A 5 Year Journey…
I remember the sense of anticipation five years ago on the 1st of March 2020 when we decided this was going to be the day we launched Mental Health Motorbike. I’d spent the previous few months intensively working with Jay Lucas my friend (and the charity’s other co-founder). I’d known Jay since he was 11 years old, Jay was also Dale Caffrey’s close friend they’ve gone through school together, got into all sorts of scrapes, fallen out, made up and survived teenage years and gone to have their own futures. Sadly. Dale’s ended at 38 years old.
Dale with his brother Ross at his wedding
I remember reminiscing at Dale’s funeral wake and saying to Jay we have to do something to stop other families going through heartache a suicide brings. I told him I’d made a promise to Dale’s family I would do something and the first thing Jay said was I will do it with you. True to his word he did and without him this Charity would not exist. Jay was working as an innovator for AutoGlym and using his business acumen really helped harness my random thoughts. He told me he would help unravel my ‘fuzzy front end’
What is the Fuzzy front end?
The strange thing was I wasn’t sure what my promise to Dale’s family would look like yet. But I knew it would involve motorbikes. Even stranger neither Dale or Jay were bikers, but this didn’t matter. I often think what Dale would of thought having a national motorbike charity named after him. I think his first comment would be WTAF! And then he would think this is great, such a typical Oxo thing!
Jay (the other charity founder) & Charlotte Lucas
I bought a motorbike specifically for this purpose. A white and black BMW R1200 GS adventure. I didn’t need another motorbike but this one was going to be different it was going to be the catalyst to set up one of the most amazing charities in the UK.
The Chariot of Goodwill – an old piece of publicity
It was the most expensive and random purchase I’d ever made (well second but the first is a different story!). I recklessly used savings and bought it off eBay massively underpriced – my thoughts when the payment request came through was it was either stolen, going to be an absolute wreck or hide a multitude of sins. But I was committed and I got a one-way ticket to Bournemouth to go and pick it up, I thought I would find out driving it home whether there were any problems, fortunately there weren’t it was a genuine seller who just wanted shut of it because he got far too many bikes and he bought it specifically for two international trips. Those two trips added 5,128 miles to the speedo and this was the mileage on the bike when i picked it up. The seller said he’d not used it since his trips and just wanted the space in his garage back. The journey home allowed me to fall in love with this bike and I knew we were going on some adventures together using it.
BMW R1200 GS Adventure
The first adventure started when I took it to a local independent garage that I’ve never used before. I asked the owners if they could have a look at the bike and tell me if there were any problems and give it a full major service. I knew this visit would be an expensive one. The guys that owned the garage (Sean and Dave) were amazing. Dave asked me what I was using the bike for I told him about my idea for the charity. He was touched by this and told me that most of the customers he deals with have some sort of mental health struggle and they don’t really know how to deal with them. He loved the idea of what I presented and disappeared off. 35 minutes later he’d still not come back. Eventually he came back and said we loved your pitch of the Charity so much that we are going to look after this bike as long as you want us to. We will service and MOT free of charge, we will maintain it free of charge and we will help you if there’s ever any problems. We don’t want anything in return we just want you to set up the charity like you’ve just discussed. At this stage I got very emotional as I’d never talked openly to a stranger about the plan and said through a few tears ‘I think you’re my first sponsor’. SD Motorcycles in Chesterfield have honoured what they said, and they still look after the bike 5 years later. They’ve also become good friends, there are so many good, genuine people out there.
SD Motorcycles Chesterfield
At the time I purchased the bike I wasn’t earning a lot of money so the last thing our family needed was for me to spend money on a BMW GS Adventure, when I told my wife I bought a motorbike to setup a charity and she did not bat an eyelid. She knew me too well! She knew I wasn’t reckless and that something interesting would be taking place (as it did with the other random purchase – which is a story for another day). For most families this would be a major issue! I remember calling it ‘The Chariot of Goodwill’ to try and soften the blow, but it wasn’t needed – but soon after it became the original Mental Health Motorbike. My wife Diane has been a very important foundation stone for the charity living and breathing it 24 hours a day, sacrificing so much and I cannot thank her enough. She works so hard behind the scenes and never asks for any recognition or thanks. Without her blessing and support the charity would not of passed the first hurdle. So many unsung heroes thread through this charity.
Our first Charity Logo
Earning little money but having a very interesting international job has really shaped me as a person and given me an inner (but intensely fragile) confidence to try new things. I remember lots of my daughters friends thought I was a spy as I was travelling abroad so much – nobody really understood what it was I did. They still don’t! lol. But that’s the story of my life as I’d chosen to focus on people centred work. Community and youth development – we all know there is no money in that. For the last 25 years I did international Youth education projects across most of Europe and different parts of the world. I’ve had some of the most spectacular adventures, met so many creative people and shaped lives in a very positive way. With all my skills surely setting up a charity would be a walk in the park… oh my! Welcome to the steepest learning curve ever.
After Brexit a lot of the funding streams which paid my wages dried up. We came out of the European funding programmes and this was a disastrous blow to young people of the UK. I found myself getting very angry at the stupidity and shortsightedness of our politicians and my mental health was slipping very badly, I knew at this stage things were going to get very rocky for me personally. My wife has worked for Derbyshire County Council Education Department for most of her career and has a good job, she encouraged me not to go chasing a new one – she said focus on setting up the Charity, do this full time – so for 3 years I didn’t earn a wage. My girls had left home, the mortgage on the house had been paid off and we weren’t destitute or in debt, for the first time in over two decades I was no longer travelling, no longer chasing self-employed contracts, no longer working to bring money in and this scared the hell out of me, but also gave me a true sense of really feeling free. I did a few international contracts, some media training and my friend built warehouses so I got a drone licence and used it to document the warehouse builds for him. That was a lot of fun!
But despite this other work my mind was really focussed on setting up this new charity for bikers which focussed on their mental health. Something I had absolutely no experience in. But anybody that knows me knows I am good at finding people that do have the knowledge and skill set, I can be very persuasive.
For about three months Jay and I met daily to unravel the fuzzy front end and research. I remember it taking about 3 weeks to identify the key question we would ask to check out whether this charity was needed – I also remember Jay threatening to kick my ass if I deviated from this question – he said focus on this one question and then if we need to ask more we repeat the process. The question was: “Is there an appetite for the motorbike community to engage with their own dedicated mental health charity” we researched this to death and overwhelming the answers were YES but can we have it as a group for everyone not just male bikers. The strength of this feedback gave us the confidence not to ask more questions – we would just go for it! And my God we did just this!
Our first bit of publicity
On the 1st of March 2020 we launched Mental Health Motorbike – our aim was to reduce those suicide statistics and therefore try and prevent other families going through the heartache of dealing with suicide in their families.
We set ourselves an ambition to have a Mental Health first aider in every town and the city in the UK. At this time we didn’t even know what this would look like and how we would begin to approach it. But we knew a man that did – Andy Elwood. Andy was a retired ‘dope on a rope’ a search and rescue and ex battlefield medic who got winched into very dangerous situations. He was also a Mental Health First Aid Trainer, I gave some media support to Andy, then as a thank you he sponsored me and Jay to go through the mental health first aid training. We knew instantly this was a course bikers would relate to. Great we now have a plan – then weird happened – the world stopped spinning – as in it just stopped, due a global pandemic called Covid 19. This wasn’t scripted or something that anyone had ever dealt with before.
We decided at this stage to start training our volunteers online during the pandemic, we thought it was very selfish for this pandemic to arrive on the day we launched the Charity! We took a decision not to put the Charity on hold but to try something different and see what creative things we could do using a new tool called Zoom. This allowed loads on people to jump on video calls together a do exciting things! There were lots of new online meetings and choirs!!! and drinking parties – tech can be awesome and very responsive when there is a global pandemic. Can you believe this was only introduced 5 years ago? Our plan started with training 100 Mental Health first aiders. Guess what? We actually achieved this and realised that people needed a specific charity for bikers looking at Mental Health. Amazing things were starting to happen. The network started to grow and before we knew it we had lots of volunteers. We had a rough plan of what we wanted and we set that out on our pop-up banners. The only difficulty was it would be over two years before covid went away and we could get the banners in front of people for real, and even then everyone was wearing masks like bank robbers.
The first white banner
The graphic below shows how many mental first aiders we have trained since we started. And how close we are to really achieving our original objectives – 1000 mental health first aiders by end of 2024. In early 2025 we are at over 900.
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MHFA pin maps
Setting a new charity for a community which has never had one before doesn’t happen overnight, it doesn’t happen without sacrifice and risks. I continued to bring very little money into the house but after all of these years I realised money has never been a motivating factor for me. When the stories of life saving work and support started coming in this was far richer content. I have a nice house, a fabulous family, I’m not in debt and I can sleep very well at night knowing what I’m doing is really important in helping others. Lots of my friends with six figure salaries say they get absolutely zero satisfaction from their chosen careers and the legacy they will have had when they retire feels non-existent. There really is something about giving something as a volunteer. In so many ways I feel very blessed not only to have had a career working in some of the most amazing countries across the world but also the adventures this brings. But much of this was leading me down a specific path to do something back home that would have profound effect on me and the way I look at myself.
Me at the start
Believe it or not I am somebody with very low self-esteem. I’ve never felt good about myself and I find being in certain large groups can be intimidating and difficult. I don’t like public speaking (but force myself to do it). I’m conscious of the way my voice sounds and the way I look and come across. With Mental Health Motorbike I have found something that’s given me strength to not care so much about these things. Because I know every time I stand up in front of somebody I aim to break the stigma of people like me talking and getting support. This really means something. It wasn’t until I set the Charity up and I started talking about my own ways of behaving and mentioned to somebody in the know that I might actually be on some spectrum with undiagnosed mental health conditions! They just rolled their eyes and said really? They already knew. I think I might have some form of ADHD, my moods can be very extreme (bi-polar?) and this can lead to bad seasonal depression which can be debilitating.
I’ve never given this any thought over the years – but it seriously has affected me and at times made me not want to be here. I went down the route of medicating myself, I’ve having spoken to numerous doctors I found tablets were making me feel worse. So, six years ago I started litter-picking the beautiful nature trail behind my house, and one hour every day I walk 4.5 miles and keep up with this. This is proved to be far better medication for me than tablets. Because no matter how shit I feel I can do this walk and it brings a sense of equilibrium back into my life. No matter how bad I feel about myself and how little I seem to feel like I’m achieving something, doing a simple litter-pick tells me I have done a worthwhile task that day. I also passionately love wildlife and the nature around me and looking after this in a very small way means a great deal. I’ve spent a lot of time looking into this and interesting perspective, I’d encorourage everyone to explore stuff like this. It’s hard to describe how much I enjoy picking up other people shit just so that the wildlife don’t have to live amongst it.
My Nature Trail – The Five Pits Trail
Strangely over the years this has grown into another very interesting community focussed project for me. When I started litter-picking we setup a Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/928984171230960) to communicate with a few other litter-pickers, we documented some of the pictures of the trail and the stories. This then gained traction and has now grown to over 6000 local people, all helping protect these beautiful trails and the wildlife. God forbid anyone who messes with the 5 Pits Trail Mafia as the responses on social media can be brutal as two local property developers have realised. The downside is I can’t walk down the trail now as the older people always want to talk to me! And sometimes I just want to be left alone. I think setting stuff like this up can be a double edged sword.
Five Pits Trail
Doing voluntary work is very special it makes me feel like I’m part of something worthwhile. I’m surrounded by nice people who care and want to make a difference. This really restores your faith in humanity.
So here we are – after five years I feel accomplished and finally at a little more peace with myself, despite dealing with a lot of difficult subject matter I know there is a lot of good people who give so much of themselves to help others. Who wouldn’t want to be surrounded by this? I’ve made lifelong friends in the last 5 years and know when my mental health slips again they will be and have been there for me. The is one very powerful safety blanket.
Some of the Mental Health Motorbike Team
Five years has gone by in a flash. The charity has grown into the country’s first dedicated free national mental health support service for the motorbike community. We have a lot of friends, we have a lot of supporters, we have a lot of volunteers. I feel very privileged to be surrounded by this and I cannot thank these people enough for what they’ve given me personally – it literally has given me back my life, which was in free fall at the beginning of this process.
To finish off this post there are so many incredible people who deserve recognition – helping me take a crazy idea and making it a reality, we have already thanked a few but there are so many more. The charity in its early days needed people to take a leap of faith into my crazy world and Mark JJ Johnson, Ken Finlayson and Weeble were there from the beginning, real rocks and proper trailblasers. Karen Cole has been my operational partner in crime giving me so much support and guidance (and loads of eye rolls!) and now much needed oversight as a trustee. Our wider trustee team Leanne McLean, Anne Moore, Mandy Stephens and Martin Marshall – so much of their time is invested into the charity. Our stunning Regional and area coordinators (too many of you to mention, but you can see their awesome faces here – https://mhmotorbike.com/the-regional-coordinators) our mental health first aiders and other volunteers, Emma Baxter, Lorna Caffrey, Martin Smith, Saul Jeavons, Rob Scott, Heidi Limbert, Steve Sexton, so many people – you are all very inspirational. But finally to our legends who are no longer with us, you may be gone but you are very much – not forgotten x
Our much loved Legends
Here’s to another five years and seeing the Charity evolve, mature, grow bigger, stronger and offering more support to what is an incredible community – motorbikers! Thank you from the bottom of my heart x
Paul ‘Oxo’
And finally very big thank you to the Oxo Girls (you are my true inspiration and without you love, support and beauty I would not be here) x
