Charlie Blair

Healthy ageing heroine
Charlie Blair

Charlie Blair is a driven hip hop dance artist and business woman who has taken her trauma and turned it into triumph.

Her business, The Blair Academy is a culmination of her personal and professional experiences as a dancer, homeless teenager, and carer for the elderly. It is a social enterprise focused on healthy, happy ageing through hip hop dance.

By disrupting assumptions, her goal is to be a trailblazer in the care sector with her innovative approach to entertaining and engaging older adults.

After enduring a period of homelessness after studying dance at college, Charlie was given a place at the University of East London to study Dance: Urban Practice. Whilst there, her grandmother Doreen was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, so Charlie cared for her nan whilst studying and developed a unique chair based exercise programme in a bid to keep her as healthy and happy as possible.

Charlie launched The Blair Academy in June 2018 after her grandmother encouraged her to call local care homes and pitch the concept to them. Doreen passed away in October, leaving Charlie to continue her legacy of challenging ageism and revolutionizing the approach we take to keeping people healthy and happy as they grow older. The Blair Academy now works with a multitude of care homes, day centres, hostels and schools.

Her work promotes intergenerational community cohesion, encourages healthy ageing, and provides an opportunity for people to feel that they have learnt something new, whilst honouring memories and music from the past. You can watch Charlie leading a class here.

Charlie Blair