The origin story - How it all started

I’ve always enjoyed finding out about the origin stories of organisations I’ve worked with. Here is ours.

Like many others, I felt to take a career break after the first wave of Covid. I needed to reflect on what mattered to me and what I wanted from the rest of my career. The only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to work on building something new, with others with similar values to me, to deliver valuable impact for society.

My search that lasted two or so years. I considered all sorts of options for myself, then finally accepted the emptiness, the feeling of confusion and concern that nothing might come at all from this process. I found myself in September 2023, reading articles about mental health issues in students and finding myself troubled by what I read.

Soon after, I came across the 2023 UN World Happiness report and discovered what was to me shocking data, for instance: “Young people now often report lower life satisfaction than older adults, a reversal of historical patterns where youth tended to be the happiest age group. This trend is noted across North America, South America, Europe, South Asia, and the MENA region”.

The turning point was a chance encounter at a meditation session where I was sitting across a young woman I didn’t know. Because of what I had read, I was deeply curious about how she was experiencing her life as a young person. I was very surprised when, at the end of the session, she walked straight up to me, introduced herself and we started the very conversation I had wanted to have. After 20mns of so of hearing her experience of friendships, social media and navigating young adulthood, I told her my heart was touched and made her a promise that I would do something about it, though I didn’t quite know what yet (She agreed to be an advisor to me during the gestation period and happily completed one of our two pilot programmes in the winter of 2024).

Soon after that transformative conversation, I realised that I had cared about this for decades. During my many global leadership programmes, I often said to participants that we should really learn these skills earlier in our life.

What felt like a brand new and fresh mission and passion had in fact been waiting in the wings of my life for many years…