A year in the Life

A Lust for Life turned one year old on October 1st, and it has just been announced that we are a recipient of a prestigious Social Entrepreneurs Ireland Impact award. It has been one amazing rollercoaster of a year so far. Here, co-founder Niall Breslin gives you the inside story on all the ups, downs and incredible journey of the last year.

I have a manic nature, everything moves at a chaotic pace in my head and in my life. I used to curse this internal energy I had cultivated over the years. Moments of calmness were like the Holy Grail which I continuously searched for but rarely if ever managed to find.

When your mind works in such a manner it becomes immensely arduous to allow yourself the headspace to recognise and elicit the past with any form of clarity. It often just seems like one big mash up of memories and vague legacies. Being aware of this has allowed me invest in processes that allow my mind space to become clearer and less turbulent.

I have worked hard on my mental fitness over the last five or so years and although I still live with an anxiety disorder, my relationship with my anxiety has changed dramatically. I no longer fear it, nor give it the power it once had over me. In certain areas of my life I embrace it as it drives me and keeps me focused. Over the years I feel my anxiety disorder has instilled a deep resilience within me, that once recognised and garnered has allowed me take on challenges I would have never seen myself undertaking. But it hasn’t been easy.

Just over 1 year after we launched A Lust for Life, I find myself being very thankful that I have learned the capacity to retrospectively recall our journey and allow myself to be proud of what we have done. What started as a blog for people to verse their personal stories around mental health has grown into a national online platform that aims to normalise the conversation around mental health and emotional well-being. In the last 12 months;

• Our website has helped educate, support, uplift and empower over 1 million people by normalising the conversation around mental health and wellbeing
• Over 13,000 people have taken part in our events all throughout Ireland which have built strong communities, compassion and solidarity, including our Facebook runners support page of almost 3,000 people
• Our advocacy work has allowed us to engage and communicate at a policy influencing level, working closely with our allies and advisors in the mental health community, joining the dots and helping to facilitate much needed change
• Our media partnerships have been vital to help us influence culture change creating greater awareness of the issues and magnifying stories that need to be heard

And yet, we are only beginning.

I’ll be honest, personally I have found the year hugely difficult. We launched the site due to the demand and reaction to the my1000hours blog, with the absolute intention of driving to contribute to the growing awareness around the mental health conversation and also the slow erosion of the stigma surrounding it.

In life sometimes you have to learn the hard way and jasus we did. We simply didn’t have the resources to cater for the reaction to A Lust for Life, the events we ran and the costs of building and maintaining it. This put us under immense pressure and exposed our areas of weakness at a very early stage. Also, initially many people perceived us as a service provider within the mental health world and were contacting us with heart-breaking and distressing stories seeking help which affected us greatly, on a heart and soul level. We had a duty of care to reach out to these people in distress and only for the support of clinical psychologist Dr. Malie Coyne this period would have been even more testing. Though we didn’t expect to receive such waves of correspondence, it highlighted to us the urgency of change required in this country around how we collectively take care of ourselves and each other.

Any start-up is incredibly stressful and difficult, but in the non-profit social enterprise area, around a deeply complex, subjective and sensitive subject, it’s magnified. We had to learn fast, we had to seek advice and supports to allow us progress. We had to establish structures to offer us the scaffolding to continue our work without getting bogged down in it. Our main goal was to create meaningful social impact and often this gets clouded and suppressed by other areas required to run a start-up, areas that are immensely important all the same.

Personally, I don’t have the type of brain that is good at the more pragmatic practical roles, my brain is better suited to ideas, concepts and creativity. Trying to galvanise both will no doubt affect each other negatively and over the last few months I have found myself in this situation.

Of course running an enterprise such as this costs money – such as the build of the site, its maintenance and the cost of our Editor for example. As a non-profit social enterprise, every cent profit we make after costs are covered is driven back into A Lust for Life to help drive our vision which is a world where the wellbeing of humanity is the headliner on the main stage and where everything else is just a support act.

It’s hugely important to us that complete transparency is at play at all stages when it comes to this and it’s one of our key values. Currently, only one of our co-founders Susan Quirke is being paid, as she is our full time Editor (plus much more) of the site, and in truth there is no one better on this island that could do the job Susan does in the way she does it. This allows us use donations and event profits in a much more efficient way as it goes directly into the project itself. Myself and the other co-founders Pritesh Symonds-Patel, Derry McVeigh, Hugh Cafferky have all invested huge personal time and money into getting this off the ground, while also attempting to maintain other work commitments, and the belief we have in it is granite like.

Do we have a lot to learn? 100%. Can the site be better? No doubt about it. Can we do more? We sure can. Can our structures be better? Definitely, but we are proud of where we stand just 12 months after we started, especially considering the difficulties we faced. The irony of it all is that we have set up a platform to try in some way help others yet have found ourselves struggling within the process.

Although we started out as a website and educational platform, we quickly realised that there were other areas of this conversation we had to engage with. People would often tell us that it’s great that we are creating awareness but in truth, adequate access to support services were hard to find. Some of the stories we were exposed to made it quite clear to us that we had to attempt to offer a louder voice, to advocate for those who were not being heard and also help signpost others to some of the brilliant services that actually do exist around mental health.

We didn’t want to do any of this in a conflicting, stone throwing way. We wanted to connect with our friends and allies in the mental health sector and join the dots to see what are the issues and potential solutions to move forward. Although we are not a service provider it’s so important that advocacy groups exist to help gain support and resources for those service providers to continue the massively important work they do. As I have said in recent months, I feel we are coming towards a new turning point in the awareness phase of this conversation and now moving into the “what the fuck are we going to do about it” phase. It’s time to start seeing the policies in “A vision for change” implemented.

In May of this year, we knew we needed much more support, guidance and investment to allow us sustain and develop. We therefore applied for the Social Entrepreneurs Ireland Impact award which had a reputation for being one of the most prestigious yet difficult awards to win in the not for profit arena. All you have to do is observe the previous winners to see the pedigree of this award. The reality was we felt it perhaps was too early in our existence to be in with a chance to win the award but felt it would be an important learning curve in the development of our vision. We decided we were going to give it everything we had in order to try and put ourselves in a position to at least learn.

The process was hand on heart as difficult as we had imagined. The award itself is 100k in funding provided over a 2 year period with another 40K worth of access to the best supports, advice and guidance to allow us build and thrive. What this could do for A Lust for life at this time can’t be understated.

We faced many challenging interview boards and processes where we were grilled on our governance, legal structures, strategies, accounts, our board, sustainability, operations and social impact. We attended many workshops to help focus our project. It made dragons den look like the Jonathan Ross show.

Looking at the phenomenal social enterprises who had won the Impact award in the past, and who had applied this year, led me to feeling perhaps this may not be our time. Some of the work they were doing was so impressive and their structures were strong. However, something in my gut made me feel that if we really zone in on this we could perhaps win this award and no one at A Lust for Life was going to take a back step at least trying so we gave it our all, over the last 6 months.

A few weeks ago I was away in the US visiting friends when I found myself picking up a rough enough stomach bug. Lying in bed feeling rather sorry for myself having not slept for the night I heard my phone vibrate beside my bed. As I opened my emails I saw that Susan had mailed me and the subject box of the mail simply said “we got it”. I knew exactly what she was talking about. All of a sudden my bug made a remarkable recovery and I jumped out of bed and let out one of those liberating and life affirming roars that could be heard the other side of the Atlantic I’m sure. In life you need these moments. No matter who you are you will always at times question your path and what you are doing, especially when the going gets tough, but it’s little moments like this that internally shake you, make you proud and fill you with self-compassion. I was and am so proud of A Lust for Life.

A year on from our launch, Susan and I recently stood on the stage of the Mansion House in Dublin to receive our Social Entrepreneurs Ireland Impact award and Susan and I delivered our speech knowing in our hearts the work we have done over the last 12 months, with Pritesh, Derry and Hugh meant something.

We want to be the best we can be and to do that we must listen, allow ourselves to be guided and supported, allow ourselves be educated by those who have come before us but at the same time lead and help facilitate much needed cultural and systemic change around mental health, and to do this collectively in community, in solidarity, with the many people all throughout Ireland who want the same thing. We are in it together.

Thanks for your support over the last year.

Special thanks to our co-founders Pritesh Symonds-Patel, Susan Quirke, Derry McVeigh and Hugh Cafferky for making A Lust for Life what it is today. Also we would not have survived this year without the incredible support from Paula McLoughlin, Colm McCormack, Ruairí McKiernan, Dr. Malie Coyne, Gar Holohan, Niamh Holohan, Karl Fitzgerald, Mairead Healy, Caroline McGuigan, Krystian Fikert, Dr. Clare Kambamettu, Dara Munnis, Dr. Eddie Murphy, Roisin Ingle, Dr. Ciara Kelly, Tony Griffin, Dr. Olivia Hurley, Rob Heffernan, our families and friends, everyone who has written for A Lust for Life, everyone who has supported us including the ESB Energy Generations Fund, Social Entrepreneurs Ireland, Mental Health Reform, VHI, The Irish Independent and Cork Airport.