An internship with Coney: Lorraine Morrissey writes

Posted on October 18th, 2019

It’s always a joy to welcome new faces at Coney, and one of the ways we do this is through placements here at HQ. This autumn we were fortunate to be an internship host for De Montfort University’s Graduate Champions scheme, welcoming the brilliant Lorraine Morrissey as Administration Associate. It’s been wonderful working with Lorraine – read on to find out what she got up to during her time here:

My name is Lorraine Morrissey and I’ve just recently graduated from De Montfort University, Leicester where I studied Accounting and Finance. I joined Coney in September 2019 as Administration Associate under a graduate internship scheme run by my university.

I’ve come to an end of my Coney adventure and internship. It was certainly one to remember. I’m so glad that DMU was able to pair me with such an amazing company. Even though my job entails doing admin/finance work, I’m lucky to have been able to get involved in many other areas of Coney. Firstly, I would like to say how lovely all the staff are! Every single person made me feel welcome and a big shout out to Rowan, my internship supervisor, for helping me to transition into Coney so smoothly. I’m glad to have spoken to all the team members and understand each of their journey leading up to and at Coney.

At the start of my internship, I was shadowing Eliza and Rowan whilst they were doing the finances for Coney. This introduced me to the processes for expenses, invoices and credit card reconciliations. They particularly showed me how everything is organised via an accounting programme called QuickBooks – it’s amazingly efficient! This area aligned very well with my undergraduate degree, so it was nice to see familiar financial processes and how this works within a small arts company like Coney.

Coney is an interesting company that use forms of theatre and play, to unite a variety of people through their interactive theatre games. It was a nice insight to sit in meetings about their different projects and see how this makes a lovely impact on people’s life, such as A Lovely Intervention. Another project I was involved in was We the People (of Margate), where I got to experience agent training to become one of Coney’s secret agents – pretty cool right? Leading on from this, we conducted a pub quiz at the Old Kent Market in Margate about different places in Margate, for and by the people of Margate. It was great to see so many people partaking in the quiz and having a good time.

I also spent some time with the Young Coneys and working with them was such a pleasure! I can’t remember the last time I felt like a carefree child just enjoying everything in the moment. It was such fun playing games like ‘Balle’ which I had never played before and listening to the inspirational views of the children, with regards to important issues, e.g. Climate change. Bearing in mind the Young Coneys are aged between 6-13, they’re creative young change makers who have amazing visions and a mature outlook of life.

Before working at Coney, I didn’t realise the multiple fundraising organisations that are available for arts companies. It was interesting to see that many of these funders have a specific pot just to support charities within the arts industry. Another thing I noticed is that there are many charities which support ex-offenders and the development of youth, both of which Coney work with in their projects.

All in all, I was doing was anything from taking meeting minutes and researching items needed for projects and using my artistic skills to create a poster for We The People of Margate – the Arcade Social. Every single task has made a positive impact on me and I hope this was the same vice versa to Coney.

I wish Coney the best progressing into the future. A lovely shout out to everyone I met at Coney: Rowan, Tassos, Eliza, Becki, Harriet, Ellie and Toby.  

Find our more about Lorraine from her bio here. And if you’re interested in organising a placement at Coney HQ, or learning from us in another way, give us a knock to find out more.