40 Yrs of Community Engagement; 7 Global Community Engagement Days
In 2017, whilst I was still living & working in Australia (based in Sydney, working across Australia, and also involved in global mental health & suicide prevention initiatives), I was contacted by two highly talented & respected community engagement professionals, Andrew Coulson & Becky Hirst, two of the nicest people on the planet, who told me they were launching “Global Community Engagement Day” on 28 January 2018.
I asked them about their ‘why’, ‘what’ & ‘how’ for starting & instituting this international day of celebration & connection for the global ‘community engagement community’, listened to their replies, and said “Count me in”!
I asked them about the ‘when’, ie why they chose 28 January, especially as it was so close to Australia Day (26 January).
They said 28 January was chosen because it was the birthday of one of the great pioneers of community engagement, Dr Wendy Sarkissian.
Wendy is respected across the globe for her leadership and her innovative & high quality practice in community engagement, and being a supportive mentor for many in the field, including Andrew & Becky.
I said “fair enough — 28 Jan it is!”.
#BeLikePaul?!
I think it’s also fair to say that I threw myself in to the inaugural Global Community Engagement Day on 28 January 2018, both in terms of promoting it in advance and participating on the Day, with the kind of Obsessive Compulsive enthusiasm that those who know me well have got used to over-the-years, but which can be a bit overwhelming for those who are new to my particular brand of passionate immersion!
Andrew & Becky were kind, generous, unconditionally supportive, and also hilarious in posting on social media #BeLikePaul!
Personally, as someone living with mental illness for more than 20 years, who’s experienced several episodes of severe depression-with-anxiety, I wouldn’t recommend being like me in some respects!
But, I knew what Andrew & Becky meant in terms of enthusiastically embracing this new international day of celebration, showcasing, sharing, connecting, and facilitating engagement for those who are involved, or want to be involved, in our beloved ‘profession’ or ‘networked community’ of community engagement.
So I took the compliment, and I look back at that first Global Community Engagement Day with great fondness.
I basically went out into my own local geographic community where I lived in Pyrmont, then extending across City of Sydney, finding clusters of natural communities, chatting, taking photos, posting on social media, and also connecting with communities of interest online — in Australia, in my native UK (I’m a dual British-Australian citizen), and across the globe.
I also posted this piece about Global Community Engagement Day including a bit of analysis about different types of communities…
I kept going across several time zones for much of what’s effectively 48 hours for a ‘Global Day’.
Positive mental & physical health, including sleep, beautiful sleep
Please note that I did sleep, and please do make sure you sleep.
Sleep is so important for our physical & mental health. Sleep regulates our body and rejuvenates our mind.
Whatever we want to be, do, or aim for in life & work, getting enough high quality sleep is crucial.
One of the main warning signs for those struggling with their mental health, is they’re not sleeping well and, whilst they might not want to open up about their struggles, they’ll usually tell you they’re not sleeping well or answer a question about how they’re sleeping right now, if you just ask.
I slipped into ‘health tips’ mode there for good reasons. It’s so important for us all — self-care and supporting those around us.
But also, Mental Health is the core theme for Global Community Engagement Day 2024, as you can see in this wonderful global panel discussion we had this year with Andrew Coulson doing a great job of holding together the energy sources that are Becky Hirst, Emma Broomfield, Dr Wendy Sarkission, and myself:
Also mental health — and suicide prevention — is now my main focus in life & work, so I’m even more enthusiastic and even more supportive of Global Community Engagement Day this particular year.
We know that some of those in our local, national & global communities will, at some point in their life & work, feel ‘Disconnected’ and possibly isolated, lonely, pessimistic, questioning their worth…at worst, when people experience ‘dark thoughts’ (I work with people who’ve experienced suicidal crisis), trapped without feeling they have options, and hopeless.
Through our mutually supportive networks and through initiatives like Global Community Engagement Day, we have the opportunity to shift people, groups, organisations & communities from Disconnected to Connected; from isolated & lonely to feeling part of a supportive group or community; from pessimistic to optimistic; from questioning our contribution to recognising our contribution and celebrating how we make a difference in our valuable work; from lacking options to having positive choices; and from lacking hope to being full of hope for the future.
As a child, I was told “where there’s life, there’s hope”. Sadly, that turned out not to be true. I’ve worked with 1000s of people who’ve lost their hope, and I’ve had periods where I’ve lost mine. It’s hard to be hopeful when the world is so shit at times and our societies & democracies seem so broken.
But I’ve turned my own life around, and — as a consultant, coach, counsellor, and mental health & suicide prevention facilitator — I’ve helped many other people turn their lives around.
And I’ve turned that aphorism around to “where there’s hope, there’s life”!
These days, when I attend business events and people ask that inevitable opening question “what business are you in?”, I say “the hope business”.
They usually reply “sorry, did you say the HOPE business?”, enabling me to continue the intrigue with “that’s right, I’m in the business of hope”.
It leads to some wonderful conversations!
Reflecting on 40 years of ‘making a difference’ & having fun!
I’d like to celebrate Global Community Engagement Day 2024, and celebrate Wendy’s birthday, and celebrate my 40 years working in this glorious field, by reflecting back on my career highlights, including the work I’ve done around mental health & suicide prevention.
There’ve been lowlights too, and I’m always more than happy to share these as well where it can help others, and to be open in response to questions you might ask around topics such as mental health, mental illness, suicide & suicide prevention, or even just projects that ‘went wrong’, or ‘didn’t go to plan’, and what we learned from these ‘bumps in the road’ — sometimes deep craters in the road!
But I want to focus here on the positive — on positive achievements; great case studies of ‘making a difference’ & ‘making change happen’; flagship projects; memorable assignments; breakthroughs in approach & outcomes; examples of overcoming challenges and moving forward on complex & sensitive matters; getting stuff done despite mental health struggles or physical health challenges along-the-way; and having fun, enjoying what we do, how we do it, and who we do it with.
When I list my work in the fields of research, community engagement, deliberative & participative democracy, coaching & counselling, transformational change, optimal mental health & suicide prevention, I know from the feedback I get that it inspires & energises most people but it can overwhelm some, so I’m sensitive to that.
It’s easy to say ‘don’t be overwhelmed’ but that doesn’t necessarily help anyone who’s feeling overwhelmed. It reminds me of the saying “No-one in the history of staying calm has ever stayed calm by being told to stay calm”!
So if you’re feeling overwhelmed while going through the content below, just take a break, and read it in bite-sized chunks, or feel free to not continue reading.
Treat it as a menu to dip in & out of, or look for another meal!
It’s good for your mental health to say ‘this is not helping and may be harming’, and to just stop doing whatever it is that’s not helping.
If you do find my list inspiring & energising, please do three things.
1) please carry on reading, and engaging with the content.
2) please tell me, because I’m as insecure & fragile as the next person — I grew up in a household where love was expressed only in a practical way like ‘food on the table’ and it was ‘an emotion-free zone’ — and I really like receiving nurturing feedback!
3) please keep a diary or journal of all your life & career highlights, key projects, breakthroughs, favourite assignments, projects you most enjoyed, times you had fun. It rarely harms and it usually helps…a lot!
Btw, Becky is a step ahead of us because she’s published her wonderful book:
Btw, Becky’s book has a Foreword by Wendy Sarkissian, and Wendy has a new book out so check that out:
OK, here goes!
Postscript
Since publishing this ‘memoir-with-lessons-for-life-and-career’ and being a panel member for the discussion around ‘Disconnection & Mental Health’ on Global Community Engagement Day 28 Jan 2024, I’ve recorded this podcast with Becky Hirst on 29 February 2024 as part of her wonderful podcast series ‘For the Love of Community Engagement’ (Series 4, Ep 4):
The Early Years — 1980s & 1990s in the UK
My participatory research & community engagement career began in 1984, working in some broken communities in Bristol, then joining social research & opinion polling firm MORI (later Ipsos-MORI, then just Ipsos).
Here, I was involved in some of the UK’s first ever residents’ surveys for local councils, research among MPs & peers, and hundreds of diverse social research projects (when people asked me what my job was, I’d say “professional nosey parker”!); before becoming more of a specialist in urban regeneration assignments, customer-centric & citizen-centric public service initiatives, and evidence-based, experience-informed public policy.
I continued with my citizen-and-customer-focused research & development and moved into what many people today would call ‘community engagement’ even though that term was rarely used in January 1989 when I took up a new role at City of York Council.
At my interview for the role, I was given 2 hours to write a paper on ‘how to make the Council customer-focused’. I quickly pointed out that customer-focused services had to sit within a citizen-focused authority in terms of policy & planning, and with excellent employee engagement internally.
I was offered the job (exciting!).
I moved from — from London to York (a huge change in work & life).
I started in my new role (slightly anxious but still mainly excited).
My new ‘boss’ handed me the paper I’d written as part of the selection process, saying “can you implement this?”.
I said “yes”, and did just that, for the next two-and-a-bit years.
I had two roles, one specifically a transformational change role in Housing, where there were some urgent issues needing to be addressed, then broadening out across all Council activities & services, making me effectively the first ever ‘Research & Engagement Manager’ at City of York Council — and one of the first people in such a role anywhere in the world.
I pioneered new approaches to, and applications of, participatory research, community engagement, and deliberative & participative democracy.
Here’s the story of ‘The York Revolution, 1989–1991’ which not only changed York irreversibly in some respects, including permanent physical changes, like the road that runs in front of York Minster (formerly a main thoroughfare having more than 100,000 vehicles a day passing through, now a peaceful pedestrian precinct), but it influenced the way local democracy works across the UK and around the world:
I then built my own business in this field which grew to 50 people and carried out many groundbreaking assignments, including my most famous project — leading the community engagement exercise to decide what to do with the site of 25 Cromwell Street in (Becky Hirst’s home city of) Gloucester.
25 Cromwell Street was the home of the serial killers Fred & Rosemary West, the so-called ‘House of Horrors’.
My role was to plan the entire engagement programme, meet with all of the victims’ families to establish what they wanted — which options should be ruled in or ruled out, and other issues they wanted us to take into account — and then work with the local community and the other key stakeholders to try and get the best possible outcome in the circumstances.
I’ve written this up as a detailed case study here:
In the course of facilitating this particular engagement exercise, we all had many life-changing experiences.
There were four for me.
1) a heightened consciousness about loss, grief, trauma & mental health. I learned a lot then, which I still reflect on today, and which still shapes my ‘practice’ today.
The loss experiences of those families was almost unimaginable, and yet our job, to some extent, is to try and imagine it, in order to build rapport, show empathy, try to understand, shape our recommendations.
But it made me more comfortable with the thought that, in some of our projects, there are things we will never be able to understand or fully imagine, and we don’t need to, and we shouldn’t try to.
We cannot have someone else’s experience, we can only listen to their experience and take that into account in our work, and try our best to support those we work with.
And everyone has a unique experience, including every experience of loss, grief, trauma & mental health challenges being unique and personal.
We mustn’t deny that person their personal experience by pretending, or deluding ourselves, that we will ever fully understand what they’ve been through or what they’re going through right now.
When I later trained and qualified as a counsellor — and practiced person-centred counselling — I thought back to this project regularly.
One aspect I often think about is that because we thought this project would be especially sensitive and difficult, we decided to have regular check-ins with the team, to make sure they were ok.
These check-ins were good, but often nothing to do with the project or subject matter. Staff often raised other issues going on in their lives and work that were causing them stress, not this project!
2) I learned how to listen!
That might sound like a strange thing to hear from someone professionally trained as a researcher and highly experienced in community engagement, but I really did learn how to listen here, especially when meeting with the victims’ families.
I realised how we often go into our projects ‘armed’ with tools, techniques, frameworks, models, lots of questions, forms to fill in, analytical frameworks to fit into, program logic charts, etc…and we’re usually under time pressure to deliver so we cram in lots of interviews, group discussions, meetings, workshops, etc. We effectively create lots of barriers to listening!
When I met with the victims’ families, I put away all of my tools, techniques, frameworks, charts…and I listened, I just listened, and I listened for many hours, and I went back in some cases and listened again.
This deep listening process influenced my decision in 2010 to launch a campaign called ‘Listen Hear: the Global Campaign for Effective Listening’ which won the 2011 TEDxSydney award for “the best idea worth spreading”:
3) I learned about the importance of saying ‘sorry’. At this point in my life, I was the kind of person who would apologise if I felt I’d ‘done something wrong’ but could be quite stubborn and ‘all IQ not EQ’ in holding out and not apologising if I was adamant I’d ‘done nothing wrong’.
But I met lots of people through this project who were regularly using the word ‘sorry’ in all sorts of different contexts, eg ‘sorry for your loss’, ‘sorry to hear about that’, ‘sorry to hear you had to experience that’, and generally being quick to apologise to help maintain positive relationships, regardless of any objective sense of ‘right or wrong’, and to be sincere in issuing an unconditional apology whenever they felt they might have caused hurt.
It fundamentally changed the way I approach communications and relationships, and I’ve since witnessed the enormous power of the apology, including to those who have suffered injustice, such as the Stolen Generations, those who suffered institutional abuse as children ‘in care’, and those who’ve been wrongly accused or convicted of a crime.
There are many more such apologies we need of course, including the thousands of subpostmasters in the UK who’ve had their lives destroyed by the way The Post Office handled the Horizon Scandal.
I also started running mutual understanding workshops where I asked people at the beginning about their own personal approach to apologising and they went into groups based on this approach to try to explain to other groups when, why & how they apologised or didn’t apologise, doing several rounds with people moving between groups until all of the participants felt they’d learned about other approaches, or at least recognised there were other approaches that resulted in different outcomes.
4) within this work, emerging through and beyond the 25 Cromwell Street assignment, I learned about the crucial importance of forgiveness.
I met Marian Partington, whose sister Lucy was one of the Wests’ victims, who told me how she’d gone through the pain of having Lucy missing for all those years not knowing what had happened to her, then the pain of knowing what had happened to her.
Marian then told me about how she’d woken up every morning hating the Wests, and wanting them dead, and then hating herself for wanting them dead, wondering if she was as bad as them for wanting to kill someone.
And she told me how she’d only been able to move on with her life when she finally took the huge step of forgiving the Wests, and forgiving herself for her own thoughts up to that point.
I subsequently heard similar stories, like from Jo Berry who lost her father in the IRA Brighton Bombing.
Jo couldn’t understand, on a human level, how anyone would want to kill the father she loved so dearly.
It took a long time to come to terms with what she was feeling and the thoughts she was having about how to bring this situation to any kind of ‘resolution’ but Jo found a path by meeting with one of the IRA bombers who killed her father, Patrick Magee, and trying to understand the situation he was in rather that think in terms of what evil one human being had brought to another human being; and trying to practice forgiveness.
Jo now works with Pat Magee and they travel all around the world running peace & reconciliation workshops, helping others to practice forgiveness, through the organisation Jo established, Building Bridges for Peace.
Both Marian and Jo were/are active with The Forgiveness Project, which was set up by Marina Cantacuzino
I got actively involved at one point, and attended some workshops on forgiveness & self-forgiveness, which are still useful for me today, especially working with people experiencing mental health struggles or suicidal crisis and those bereaved by suicide who live with guilt, shame, regrets, pain, suffering, ‘what if’ questions, unresolved ‘why’ questions.
I often introduce them to this definition of (self) forgiveness:
Also, as a result of the deep introspection I was having around projects like this, plus taking on growing responsibilities with my business, plus joining the Academy for Chief Executives to get the kind of support I needed to help me in my role(s), plus getting my first ever executive coach, I decided to train as an executive coach, which was absolutely fascinating.
I started coaching other CEOs, business owners & senior leadership teams.
I built rapport with my clients, created a relationship of trust, and they would open up to me about all sorts of topics — their business growth plans, team development issues, personal career aspirations, client relationships.
And, because of the trust in our relationship, they’d often open up about their mental health struggles.
At this point, I wasn’t a trained, qualified counsellor like I am now, so I would help in trying to get them the support they needed.
At this point in my life and career, I was a highly successful CEO of a highly successful, award-winning business, a nationally-recognised ‘transformational change expert’, a highly sought after executive coach, and in-demand public speaker…
…but I then experienced burnout in 2003–4 and — after a month off work travelling around South Africa didn’t really help (nice holiday but burnout isn’t ‘cured’ by a holiday!) — I took the rather radical step of moving to Australia, where I lived & worked from February 2005 to August 2019.
My Australian Adventure!
My time in Australia was a rollercoaster ride.
Some big highs and amazing projects, including working with 15–16 year old kids in Indigenous communities in the Outback who’d never ever seen the sea, and being paid by Tourism Queensland to visit the Whitsunday Islands to carry out research (well someone has to do it!).
And some big lows, including a breakdown after my dad died (in the UK) in October 2010.
This was after I’d got dual Australian-British citizenship and was able to leave the corporate world and set up my own business in January 2010.
My dad’s death hit me much harder than I expected, and other factors conspired to send me into a severe depression and life-threatening crisis.
I came through it and back onto the rollercoaster ride, and started specialising in (workplace) mental health and suicide prevention, working with the Mentally Healthy Workplace Alliance and clients like Beyond Blue and SuperFriend (a not-for-profit foundation dedicated to mental health & suicide prevention, funded by the superannuation & insurance sector).
This included (via a literature review, survey research, and two stakeholder workshops in Melbourne & Sydney) mapping out what a ‘mentally healthy workplace’ looks like; and designing and establishing the ‘Indicators of a Thriving Workplace’ Survey, now in its 9th year.
It’s been enhanced by great teams of researchers and the SuperFriend team(s), with the sample size boosted, now at 10,000 per year to be able to analyse the results by sector.
In 2013, for the 60th anniversary of the Samaritans in the UK and the 50th anniversary of Lifeline in Australia, I facilitated workshops & forums, including a global forum on ‘breakthrough ideas for suicide prevention’ which generated ’10 Big Ideas’ to get the suicide numbers down.
I worked with clients like Suicide Prevention Australia, carrying out research & engagement with various groups including researchers and community engagement professionals, people with lived experience of mental illness & suicide, policymakers, academics, charities, service providers, and funders.
I facilitated the process that led to the establishment of the National Suicide Prevention Research Fund (with an initial $12 million seed funding from the Department of Health) and the creation of the very first National Suicide Prevention Strategy for Australia.
The article below summarises some of this work, and there was a session I ran at the Australian Market & Social Research Society Conference (AMSRS — now The Research Society) in Melbourne in 2014, which included research studying the mental health of researchers and those working in community engagement:
It also mentions innovative research projects we carried out at that time, including for the Mentally Healthy Workplace Alliance.
One survey was the first to generate results such as 45% of employees in Australia saying they’d left a job (or left a workplace, or left a manager!) because of “a mentally unhealthy” or psychologically unsafe workplace.
Another sophisticated piece of research — the Employer of Choice study — identified the sub-conscious drivers of choices in employment decisions.
This study showed that a mentally healthy environment and factors (potentially) affecting mental health were second only to pay in driving job choices.
I presented this research at the 2014 National Suicide Prevention Conference in Perth. Many of those in the audience questioned the research findings, saying they’d never heard this before, and it seemed high. I explained that previous studies had not included these mental health factors, and also this was a new methodology.
Rather than asking people for conscious drivers of choices, eg ‘which of these are most important?’, we used a discrete choice modelling approach where all the factors were randomised and the different random combinations came up on the screen so those taking part in the research just had to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to different scenarios or job offers, and we could then analyse which factors were actually driving their choices.
Conference delegates also made comments like “no-one has ever asked me at a job interview about mental health”. I was able to explain that they don’t due to the stigma, but they do scan the organisation, and ask questions like “what’s the culture like here?” and about ‘management & leadership styles’, much of which is checking ‘will I be safe here?’.
At this Conference in Perth, I also attended a ‘Healing Ceremony’ for people with lived experience of suicide, which was an incredible and unforgettable experience.
Below is a slide deck from a presentation I delivered to the Insight Innovation Exchange (IIeX) Asia Pacific Conference in Sydney in 2014.
It includes slides showing the ideas that emerged from global forums on breakthrough ideas for suicide prevention; the approach we took when facilitating workshops to develop national suicide prevention strategies & plans; the Employer of Choice research; details of workshops on ‘Being Prepared to be Helped’; and transformation through technology:
The ‘transformation through technology’ initiatives included improving search technology for those searching for harmful material or for information about suicide that could be harmful, including testing some of the early virtual assistants; ‘Tracking for Life’ apps for people known to be at suicide risk to help support them; and ‘Digital Life Saving’ to help identify people not known individually but potentially at risk or in danger.
2014 was a huge year in many ways. It included me getting through to the final of the TEDxSydney ‘Fast Ideas’ competition for “the best idea worth spreading”, becoming the first person to reach the final twice!
This time, I had 30 seconds to speak from the stage to a packed Sydney Opera House about the concept of ‘Digital Life Saving’.
I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of talks & presentations over the years, but I’ve never rehearsed more than for this 30 seconds, to make the most of it, and have the biggest impact possible:
This article for the ESOMAR Foundation “Research & Engagement ‘Making a Difference’ and Saving Lives” from 2018 also summarises a lot of this work around mental health & suicide prevention.
By this point, I was becoming regarded as ‘an expert’ in suicide prevention which is always dangerous because it’s important to stay grounded and humble, to recognise what you don’t know, and to keep learning.
But I was clearly confident enough in my thinking at this point about what would get the suicide numbers down, that I made this submission to the Productivity Commission Inquiry on mental health & suicide prevention in May 2019.
I’d begun working with the global ‘Zero Suicide’ community or — as some called themselves — the ‘zero suicide community’ or the ‘Zero Suicide in Healthcare’ movement, which began in Detroit when the Henry Ford Health System made the bold step of aiming for ‘perfect healthcare’ and ‘zero suicides’ and managed to reduce the number of suicides by 75% in four years.
I ran a global engagement project on these ‘zero suicide’ initiatives around the world to learn about what was being done to get the numbers down, and transferable lessons.
Return to the UK, August 2019
It was getting progressively harder to be in Australia with family in the UK.
When my wife & I moved to Australia in 2005, we didn’t have any grandchildren but we now have 5 granddaughters!
I also had more mental health challenges and personal crises, and was also diagnosed with ‘compassion fatigue’ which a clinical psychologist has since told me doesn’t exist — a story for another day!
On return to the UK, I reflected on my research, community engagement, consultancy, and coaching career, and life, and wrote this piece (which at the time I thought was my magnum opus — it might have been superseded by two major publications in 2023, detailed later):
As we settled back into the UK and implemented our own mental health life plans, including being mortgage-free (huge for my mental health, and for many others) and renovating a house to our specific requirements…
…I picked up my transformational change coaching & consultancy work, my training workshops, and lectures to business schools, with much interest in my ‘3 Key Dynamics of Change’ model which I’ve used for 35 years, to facilitate many huge and lasting changes in the UK & Australia.
I worked freelance in the UK which was hard initially then, ironically, business boomed after the first COVID19 Lockdown, with several clients wanting me to help them with ‘survive & thrive’ strategies — or just survive! — and being contracted to work with the Zero Suicide Alliance (please check it out — and take — their ‘Gateway’ course in suicide prevention, it’s 20 minutes online, and free, and can help you save lives):
I also facilitated wellbeing workshops for several clients, including the OneTeamGov network for people working in government in all its forms.
I suggested running an event for OneTeamGov on suicide prevention for World Suicide Prevention Day 10 September 2020 and was told it might not attract interest — “it could be niche” someone said.
I curated 15 speakers, 11 of them with lived experience, we put up the invite…and 933 people registered for it!
So not ‘niche’ then!!!
I put together this help & resources pack for those attending the event, and anyone else interested. Some of these sites or sources may be out-of-date but this should still be a good place to look for where you might get support (in the UK and around the world):
Coinciding with the OneTeaGov event, I wrote up the key results and lessons learned from my research and engagement with the global ‘zero suicide community’:
I introduced the OneTeamGov event:
My Journey with The Jordan Legacy Begins (2020)
One of the speakers I booked for the OneTeamGov event on World Suicide Prevention Day 2020 was Steve Phillip, who I’d met and bonded with over the past 3 months.
Steve spoke about losing his son Jordan to suicide in December 2019:
Steve founded The Jordan Legacy to be dedicated to practical actions to prevent suicides, later refining this mission — in line with our transformational change philosophies & frameworks — to getting the suicide numbers on a downward trend, towards zero.
The Jordan Legacy website also summarises ‘Jordan’s Story’ which of course is also ‘Steve’s Story’ and it’s Steve’s ‘why’ — why he does what he does and continues to do what he does now:
I now work with Steve, and I’m Chief Facilitator of the Zero Suicide Society Transformation Programme to create a ‘Zero Suicide Society’ which is a society “that is willing and able to do all it can to prevent all preventable suicides” and get the suicide numbers on a long-term downward trend, towards zero.
We run talks, webinars, workshops, panel discussion events — with all the recordings from all our events being on our website for viewing:
Our Talks & Presentations, including Steve’s “How to Cope with The ‘S’ Word” and my“Gaining an Understanding of Loss” are listed here:
We run conferences, like the Hope for Life Conference, which was designed to bring together people with lived experience of suicide to hear hopeful stories, stories of ‘tragedy to triumph’, ‘life after loss’, and hope after trauma & grief’.
It was also designed to be around the anniversary of Steve & his family losing Jordan (in December 2019) so it would provide future positive memories to look back on, at a time of year that has such sad memories.
Here’s a short highlights video of the first Hope for Life Conference:
We carry out research & engagement, and get involved in campaigning & advocacy (using our research and engagement, including plugging gaps in key national data sets).
We thank MEL Research for carrying out this twice-yearly survey among a representative sample of 1500 UK residents aged 16+, and doing this for us pro bono:
We curate resources to help support people and organisations:
We collaborate with people & organisations developing new approaches and new technology, like the R;pple intervention tool (our partner Alice Hendy just got an MBE for her services to online safety):
We have the world’s only fortnightly radio show dedicated to suicide prevention and listening to diverse lived experience voices. The recordings of all shows are on our website, forming an incredible resources library:
Steve & I were co-creators & co-founders of the Baton of Hope — along with Mike McCarthy (who lost his son Ross to suicide in February 2021) and Ian McClure (who lives with mental illness).
In June/July 2023, the Baton of Hope toured 12 cities in the UK and was the biggest ever gathering of people with lived experience of suicide — more than 1000 Baton Bearers.
Here’s a short video highlights reel from the (Greater) Manchester leg:
And here’s a stunning film from an extraordinary day towards the very end of the Baton of Hope’s Tour in Brighton (& Hove):
In January to June 2023, Steve & I dedicated ourselves to an action research & engagement project to listen to all those in our network, plus key stakeholders nationally, focused simply on “which practical actions will get the suicide numbers down?”.
We published our first edition report on 11 July (which would have been Jordan’s 38th Birthday) and asked for feedback and further suggestions, which came in waves.
Here’s a webinar briefing on the action research project and our Report ‘Moving Towards a Zero Suicide Society’ (Aug 2023):
We published the second edition of ‘Moving Towards a Zero Suicide Society’ in September in what has been called by several Suicide Prevention Leads “a groundbreaking report”:
We distributed this report far and wide, and continue into 2024 delivering talks, presentations & workshops to take people through its contents.
We also published a formal response to the Government’s new National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England, 2023–2028, which we criticised for being woeful in its low ambition:
I privately described the Government’s National Strategy as woeful in its low ambition, shameful in its language and spinning of the suicide statistics and claims of ‘progress’ since 2012 (the suicide numbers have actually flat-lined since 2012 so no progress!), and potentially harmful — at worst “a suicide prevention strategy that prevents us preventing suicides”!
Several Suicide Prevention Leads asked me if I could write a paper with more detail on this.
I carried out a comprehensive content analysis and a ‘change dynamics’ assessment, and published this damning critique of not only the National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England but the national strategy process used in many other countries too, including Australia & Canada, entitled — deliberately provocatively — “Are we ‘in the Suicide Prevention business or is it Suicide Maintenance?”:
The Jordan Legacy also launched a petition to parliament for the measures we need government & parliament to take to help us get the suicide numbers down, towards zero, and we got the 10,000 signatures needed to require the Government to formally respond in writing to our proposals.
Ending 2023 with Momentum, then Moving in to 2024 and Beyond
The day of finishing writing up this summary of my 40 years in community engagement, we actually got the formal written response from the Government to our petition proposals, and it was embarrassingly poor, which is actually quite useful!
It would have been better if it was a positive, constructive response, but the second best outcome from an advocacy & campaigning perspective was an appallingly poor response that everyone could see was dreadful!
Here it is:
We’ve already sent out a newsletter and posted on LinkedIn to expose just how poor this response is, including ignoring our previous response to the Government’s National Suicide Prevention Strategy in September 2023, which I’ve provided the links to previously above.
In November 2023, I spoke at the launch of a potential groundbreaking mental health & suicide prevention app called iTalk, and we had the key person driving this ‘tech for good’ innovation, Darren Barden, as a guest on our radio show.
Darren told us how he’d had two near-death experiences.
The first was when, in a terrible case of mistaken identity, he was beaten to a pulp and stabbed 47 times by two masked men turning up at his door armed with multiple knives. Thankfully & incredibly, Darren survived this.
The second was 13 years later when Darren experienced PTSD, severe depression, and a suicidal crisis.
In the course of ‘telling his story’, Darren provides perspective when he says if he had to go through one of those two experiences again, he’d choose the beating & stabbings every time!
Darren has also written a book about his ‘story’:
Darren works with the Construction sector.
In the UK, almost 10% of all suicides are among people working in Construction.
Add in those, like Darren, working with the Construction sector, and it’s around 1 in 7 of all suicides.
People in the Construction sector are 3–4 times more likely to die by suicide than those working in other sectors.
People working in the Construction sector are 10 times more likely to die by suicide than by physical accidents at work.
Yes, these are shocking statistics, and they’re challenging startistics
And they are similar in other countries too.
Darren wanted to do something about this.
He thought an app would work well for Construction workers.
He teamed up with a tech genius called Phil Thorne
iTalk was born.
This is Darren & Phil at the launch:
and a banner display for iTalk:
I’ve worked in the fields of suicide prevention, tech for good & digital life saving for more than 10 years now, and this is the best prospect I’ve seen for reducing the numbers of suicide via integrated digital-human systems.
I’ve facilitated dozens of research & engagement projects and been involved in several R&D initiatives where I’ve put forward ideas only to have them knocked back or put in the ‘too hard’ basket.
It can be a very frustrating field, including governments not being prepared to invest or take any risks whatsoever, even where lives can be saved; and academics having dinosaur perspectives or getting bogged down in ethics debates & processes, even where new approaches can almost certainly save lives.
With Darren & Phil, it was like an oasis in the desert.
They listened to the ideas that had emerged from my previous projects over the past 10 years and simply said ‘let’s do it’!
And iTalk is being funded without any government grants or public money, it will be entirely private funding, with initial development coming from within the Construction sector.
So, Steve & I will be working with Darren and the iTalk team in 2024.
The iTalk app will also incorporate the Speak Up app functionality which is designed both for simple product & service improvement and ideas for improving your environment or workplace, and also the world’s most secure whistleblower identity protection system.
And that speaks to another topic close to my heart, as I know many people whose mental health — and lives — have been destroyed after they were outed as ‘whistleblowers’ (or ‘ethical champions’ I’d prefer to call them):
We finished 2023 with the Hope for Life Conference in December, which was another huge success.
One of our speakers was one of the world’s top speakers, Richard McCann.
Richard is famous for his motivational speaking engagements, events, workshops & human development programmes:
Tragically, Richard is also famous because his mum, Wilma McCann, was the first victim of the serial killer, Peter Sutcliffe (at Richard’s request, please don’t use the moniker that was given to Sutcliffe, and that created such fear, just call him Peter Sutcliffe, a flawed human being, and try to focus on his victims not the man who brutally murdered them).
And, further tragedy, Richard lost his sister Sonia to suicide. So he lost his mum to homicide and his sister to suicide, two women he adored.
One of the main terrestrial TV channels, ITV, recently had a 7-part dramatisation of the story of those women, The Long Shadow, seen through the eyes of those women & their families — including the ‘system fail’ (from the police to the media) that let them all down.
Richard was played in the early episodes by a child actor, and appeared as himself as the credits rolled at the end, as a feel good finish to show how he’s done so well out of the most awful, traumatic life.
Richard gave himself to us for our 2023 Hope for Life Conference, including showing us something he’d never shown anyone before — a video of him and his sister Sonia.
Although they had a suicide pact, and Richard came through three suicide attempts, so the whole experience is tough for Richard, he wanted to share the good times with Sonia…with us. We felt honoured & humbled.
And Richard told one of his own stories of transformation — “getting his mum back”.
Of course, his mum died many years ago, in 1975, but Richard said he’d been haunted by the awful black & white photo the media & police have used ever since, with his mum looking so sad, and so lifeless, and so not like the mum he knew.
But thanks to Howard Rushfirth, of Rushfirth Creative in Leeds, his mum was somehow ‘brought to life’ in colour, and with a few other creative adjustments, Howard was able to give Richard a picture of his mum as he remembers her, so he feels like he’s got his mum back.
and he’s very happy about it, and he was interviewed on the BBC with the Beeb agreeing to use this photo from now on, and to not use the ugly, offending moniker of his mum’s killer.
This is me speaking at the 2023 Hope for Life Conference, with my talk “Gaining an Understanding of Loss”.
This talk covers all the different types of loss experiences, as they are many and diverse, and it always challenges people’s thinking.
I had 6 people coming up to me, or contacting me afterwards, saying my talk had ‘changed their life’.
Of course, I can’t claim the credit for this. I just helped them hear a message that resonated, in a place they felt safe & secure enough to open up, and where I felt safe & secure enough to open up. And I did open up!
You’ll notice in the photo ‘the empty chair’. This represents all those who couldn’t be with us at the Conference, including all those we’ve lost.
For the first time ever in public, I spoke about losing my dad.
Below is Ian Russell, now Ian Russell MBE. Ian got an MBE in the New Year’s Honours, as did Alice Hendy who also spoke at our 2023 Hope for Life Conference; in both cases, for services to online safety.
Ian has campaigned relentlessly, with calm, quiet efficiency and effectiveness for the past 5 years to get the Online Safety Bill on the statute book, after his awful experience of losing his daughter Molly to suicide at just 14 years of age.
Molly’s Inquest has become a landmark case because the coroner ruled that the social media firms contributed to Molly’s death and, for the first time ever, a Meta executive appeared in-person at the Inquest.
Jurisdictions around the world trying to challenge the unethical might of the global social media firms are referencing Molly’s case.
At our Hope for Life Conference, we gave our 2023 ‘Creating Impact’ Award to Ian Russell and the charity he established, the Molly Rose Foundation.
We also gave our 2023 ‘Spirit of Collaboration’ Award collectively to all of the Baton of Hope local organisers across all 12 cities.
And here’s me & Steve enjoying the whole experience:
We started 2024 with another breakthrough — suicide, suicide bereavement & suicide prevention being the lead story on prime time BBC1 News as Steve & The Jordan Legacy were featured in this wonderful piece of public education around talking about suicide:
And our work continues every day, including Steve joining many other charities and suicide prevention campaigners on trains & stations on Monday 15 January (dubbed ‘Blue Monday’, which is a myth created by companies trying to sell holiday packages, and now positively turned into ‘Brew Monday’) handing out free drinks, and leaflets about suicide prevention.
Why are we forming a collaborative partnership with Championship football club, Norwich City FC.
This is why — one of the greatest pieces of suicide prevention educational content ever made and broadcast.
Across all platforms worldwide, it’s been seen by 60 million people.
It works in every country, regardless of culture or language.
I started 2024 with the release of probably the best podcast I’ve ever been involved in.
I did my bit (well, have a listen and judge for yourselves). I had the wonderful Evelina Dzimanaviciute, from Elite Mind, alongside me:
And we had our excellent host, Alison Dunn, asking great questions.
All-in-all, it was a recipe for a truly excellent podcast.
But something else made it uniquely special.
The day before we recorded the podcast, Alison — previously with no lived experience of suicide — experienced a very public suicide on her way to work, and her life has changed forever as a result.
I checked in with Alison to see how she was. I asked her if she wanted to go ahead with the recording. She was absolutely resolute. She said “yes, I want to go ahead with our podcast on suicide & suicide prevention— more than ever”.
In the circumstances, Alison did a remarkably professional job.
Just before Global Community Engagement Day, I delivered a presentation at a webinar for a global network of independent research & insight professionals — some of whom specialise in community engagement or social research, some of whom specialise in commercial insights or market research — with some of my transformational change community attending and some of my global mental health & suicide prevention peers there.
This global network is called The ICG. The presentation was entitled ‘Transformational Change Dynamics — and The ‘S’ Word”.
Here’s the link to the webinar, along with links to all the references and source material (I was being a good researcher!):
https://theicg.co.uk/recording-transformational-change-dynamics-and-the-s-word/
Our ‘Zero Suicide Society Transformation Programme’ is being rolled out this year, including our #ZeroSuicideSociety #JoinTheDots Tour 12–23 June which will begin with a huge Launch Conference in Scunthorpe on 12 June and will travel from the Humber to the Mersey connecting up people & organisations currently working in suicide prevention, pulling in and educating others, and ‘joining the dots’ in terms of the different ‘pieces of the puzzle’ in our Zero Suicide Society model being connected together.
Postscript: Bookings site open for tickets for the Launch Conference:
On the Tour, there will be ‘serious’ talks, campaigns, advocacy & media, eg around our audit of mental health support, psychological safety & suicide prevention for students in all the universities & higher education institutions we pass along our route (we have collaborative partners who’ve lost sons & daughters to suicide whilst studying at university, they launched a petition that got 128,000 signatures, and they’ve currently got their case for a statutory duty of care in the High Court).
But there will also be fun, lots of bonding, lots of connecting & engaging, lots of self-care, lots of mutual support, and displays of ‘self-care leadership’, not flogging ourselves or burning out or breaking down in doing all of this. We will give a very high priority to our mental health, including ‘down time’, quiet reflection time, and ‘peace walks’.
When we get to Liverpool on 21 June, we’ll work with our collaborative partners in staging a ‘Merseyside Festival’ 21–23 June (there’ll be arts, music, sport, etc) to finish our #ZeroSuicideSociety #JoinTheDots Tour, and that will dovetail nicely into the 5th International Zero Suicide Summit, which is being held in the UK for the first time, in Liverpool.
Then we’ll have a rest!
If you find all of that breathtaking and hard to believe…we have to keep pinching ourselves as well!
It’s exhilarating stuff.
Btw, I had another episode of depression in late 2022/early 2023 and struggled some days with writing anything or believing anything I was doing was any good or believing I would ever make a difference ever again…
…but I coped — learning from past experience (and without medication this time, which I came off in 2019 after 7 years) — recovered in June/July 2023, partly because of the work we were doing and the phenomenal positive response we got to our report ‘Moving Towards a Zero Suicide Society’, and I’ve been on full throttle ever since, with my management of my mental health & physical health making sure I don’t do too much too quickly.
It’s a challenge but finding ‘the sweet spot’ around clear meaning & purpose is one of life’s greatest joys.
Wishing you all good health, happiness, a hopeful future, and plenty of time in your own sweet spot!
I’m going to leave you with two things.
Firstly, one of the greatest songs ever written ‘The Greatest Love of All’.
Take your pick (btw, positive mental health = feeling you have choices!)
You can have the George Benson original:
Or you can have the Whitney Houston version:
It’s a song that includes the iconic line “I believe that children are our future”. Indeed, they are.
So, just one more thing to say — Go Florence!
Paul Vittles FMRS FAMI FRSA is a Research Fellow, community engagement facilitator, transformational change agent, coach, counsellor, and lived experience advocate for mental health & suicide prevention.
Paul main focus now is in his role as Chief Facilitator, Zero Suicide Society Transformation Programme, which he runs through The Jordan Legacy, highlighting that ‘suicide prevention is one of the great transformational change challenges of our time’; demonstrating the practical actions that will get the suicide numbers down, towards zero; and rolling out this Transformation Programme, including through the #ZeroSuicideSociety #JoinTheDots Tour in June 2024.
You can financially support the work of The Jordan Legacy CIC via its website, or through a donation to support the Zero Suicide Society action research & community engagement via this JustGiving page:
