Karen Meenan

Karen is a self-employed entrepreneur. She has worked as a brand manager, marketing manager, and sales manager with BWG Foods before opening her own SPAR shop in Dublin. She has been operating a successful retail and training consultancy since 2001. Her interest in dementia was sparked when her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2012. As a founder member of the Forget-Me-Nots choir, she witnessed the power of dementia-inclusive creative aging. She returned to college to attain a BA (Hons) Drama and founded “Making Hay Theatre” in 2017 and has co-created three plays through dementia-inclusive inter-generational workshops; “We Were All Young Once” (2017), “A Play with ME in it” (2018), and “The Lost in Time Bookshop” (2020). She is currently a presenter, researcher, and producer of “Reminiscence on the Radio” a dementia-inclusive weekly series on Near FM. “Reminiscence on the Radio” is a weekly series on Near FM Community Radio which features songs, stories, news items, and soundtracks and invites Karen’s guests to share their special poems on air. Making Hay Theatre is an intergenerational theatre group which meets in-person and virtually to co-create new dementia-inclusive plays. Three new plays “We Were All Young Once,” “A Play with ME in it,” and “The Lost in Time Bookshop” have already been produced and performed to a dementia-inclusive audience. She also has Dip Marketing and Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) Radio Training.