We are a fast growing young charity and so we have created this page to share exciting progress and keep you up to date with our new projects, funding announcements, events and fundraisers.
Suicide&Co’s News
2024
Our Sector Summit
We hosted our first Sector Summit on the 29th of February! Our Sector Summit brought together experts in bereavement and suicide, focusing on suicide bereavement service delivery. This event was for anyone working with people bereaved by suicide, to learn from peers and walk away feeling inspired to further enhance service delivery for people navigating suicide loss.
Throughout the day heard from a variety of experts through keynote presentations, panels and fireside chats across four main themes; personalisation within service delivery, innovation, data-driven decision making, and managing suicidal risk. It was a brilliant day and after some great feedback we have decided to host the event again next year!
National Lottery Grant
We are proud to announce that we have won a grant from the National Lottery Community Fund for £19,200, to help to fund counselling costs and awareness activity for men, to increase the accessibility of our service. We are so pleased to have won a grant from the National Lottery and look forward to working with them on this project.
Always in Company Project Announcement
We are proud to have won another grant from Rethink Mental Illness, to launch a new project in collaboration with The Photography Movement, where we will be creating an online gallery of photos that represent what ‘company’ means to our community. The submissions are open to everyone, from everyday iPhone photos to professional photographers.
Thank you to Rethink for supporting us on another project!
10 before 10 walk in Brighton
On the 10th of May, we hosted our second in-person walk for #10before10 in beautiful, sunny Brighton!
We know that walking and talking can help facilitate some really important conversations, so we were so pleased to see our community coming together to engage, fundraise and support us and each other.
It was such a lovely way for us to connect with so many members of our community and share a morning of exercise and self-care, all before 10 am! What a perfect way to kickstart the day! We look forward to hosting more in-person #10before10 challenges soon.
Thank you so much to everyone who came and joined us, especially on a weekday! We would also like to say a massive thank you to our volunteer Iain for running the walk.
Padel Tennis Tournament
On the 12th of May, we teamed up with Padel Project UK to host our very first sports event!
This was such an exciting event that offered a wonderful opportunity for us to engage and connect with different members of the community and enjoy some great conversations amongst the excitement of the tournament. We were also lucky to have perfect weather on the day!
A huge thank you to everyone who attended and supported the event, and congratulations to all the players, as well as everyone who came to cheer on the action!
If you have any suggestions for future sports tournaments you would like Suicide&Co to host, please do let us know! We are open to all ideas and would love to hear your thoughts.
Always in Company Social Launch
During Mental Health Awareness week, we launched our new campaign Always in Company in partnership with the Photography Movement.
This campaign asked our community to think about what company looks like to them. We then encouraged people to submit photos which represented their vision of ‘company’ to us, to be showcased on our website in a dedicated online gallery. We hope this collection will inspire you to think about how you value company and how you could improve your unique methods of support.
We were blown away by the overwhelming response to our Always in Company campaign, as we received over 100 submissions, including contributions from professional photographers such as Rankin and Lawrence Watson! The collection features a wonderful array of images which capture themes of community, friendship, loyal companions, nature, joyful chaos, and even the peace of shared silence.
If you would like to see the submissions, please check out the Always In Company area of our website.
Always in Company Launch Events
Manchester
To celebrate the launch of the Always in Company campaign, the Suicide&Co Team travelled to Manchester to host two Q&A presentations with Johnny Oakes, and with Isy and Leigh Anderson at Use Space!
Through both presentations, we were able to elaborate on our motivations behind the Always in Company campaign and engage in stimulating discussions with our audience. We also explored why we felt it was important for our community to think about the idea of company in an inspirational and uplifting way.
London
We also celebrated the launch of our Always in Company campaign in London, by hosting a thought-provoking Q&A discussion, joined by a wonderful panel of special guests.
Throughout the evening, we explored the many different aspects of the project, generating insightful and creative discussions with some photographers who made submissions to the project: Steve Wallington, Charlie Clift and JJ Keith.
Bristol
Bristol was the final location for the launch of our Always in Company project, where we spent a wonderful lunchtime meeting members of our community. The Suicide&Co team presented the project and held another Q&A!
Always in Company Billboards
We were overwhelmed by the sheer creativity we received in the submissions to our Always in Company campaign, and we were so excited to have the opportunity to display some of these pieces on billboards across the country!
Submissions were displayed on billboards across London, Manchester, Birmingham and Southampton, and it was absolutely incredible to see the project coming to life on the screens!
Always in Company Auction
As some of the photos in the submissions for the Always in Company campaign were so beautiful, we knew people would want to buy them as a piece of art expressing a representation of ‘company’!
Therefore, we decided to open an auction to sell some of the pieces from the collection, including submissions from Adrian Houston, Charlie Clift, Bill Bernstein and Amelia Troubridge, with all proceeds going towards Suicide&Co to help support individuals bereaved by suicide. This was such a success, raising £2,675 amount, which helped to provide 89 counselling sessions.
We would like to say a massive thank you to all of the photographers who donated their pieces and contributed to the auction!
New Service Testimonials
In May, we spoke with members of our community who had accessed our Counselling Service, to hear about their experiences and the support that they were provided through our service.
We captured these discussions as video testimonials and released them on our social media platforms at the end of May to help better inform people about the service we provide.
The videos help to provide insight into receiving counselling from Suicide&Co and to share stories of people with lived experience navigating suicide loss.
We are so grateful to our service users for sharing their stories and experiences with us.
Thank you so much to everyone who participated and bravely shared their experiences. You can watch the full videos here on our YouTube channel.
Podcast Season 2
After much-awaited anticipation, in August we finally launched Season 2 of our podcast Conversations in Company with our amazing hosts Ben West and Isabelle Farah!
We were so excited to bring this back with 6 brand new episodes exploring 6 different themes surrounding suicide and suicide bereavement. Our Hosts were joined by some brilliant guests for some brave and honest conversations about the suicide loss journey.
We released new episodes weekly which are still available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and the full episodes can be watched over on our YouTube as well!
34k Challenge
On the 7th and 8th of September, we had over 60 incredible individuals take part in our 34k Challenge; raising awareness of the 34,000 people newly bereaved by suicide each year (on average) and raising funds to help us support our community.
Our challengers took on the distance in so many different ways and we have been blown away by the variety this year. In total, we raised over £70,000 (including gift aid), doubling our original target for this year!
We also hosted an in-person 34k Challenge event at the Zscaler offices in London with the help of our wonderful ambassadors, Taran, where members of staff raced to get to 34km on stationary bikes first! This was such an exciting way to take part in the 34k Challenge, thank you to everyone who got involved!
Thank you so much to all those who have participated or donated this year! Bring on our 2025 challenge!
Grief Opera
In collaboration with Nigel Linacre, On World Suicide Prevention Day, we held an unforgettable evening performance of The Grief Opera, in Bath. The powerful performance took us on a journey that resonated with all who have experienced loss. The opera was crafted by Nigel, who has personal experience of suicide bereavement, who put together this unique and emotional experience, combining elements of opera, musicals and concerts, and weaving classical styles and jazz.
We would like to say a massive thank you to all those who came by and hope this creative outlet helped resonate with many of you.
If we don't laugh we’ll cry Event
At the end of September, we were so excited to host an evening of community, laughter, and togetherness, with Amie and Alicia from If We Don’t Laugh We’ll Cry at the Feel Good Club in Manchester, along with our good friend Amber Jeffery from the Grief Gang.
It was such a lovely space for people to come together and explore their experiences of grief and loss in a supportive environment. Thank you so much to everyone who came!
Every Little Thing Festival
In October, we attended the Every Little Thing Festival in Reading! While we were there, our CEO and Co-Founder, Amelia, spoke to some attendees to ask about the 'little thing' that they do for self-care and maintaining their mental wellbeing.
A big thank you to Sinead and the team at Every Little Thing Festival for raising funds for us on the day!
Royal Parks Half Marathon
On the 13th of October, we had 26 amazing runners take part in the Royal Parks Half marathon in London, all raising money for Suicide&Co; it was such an exciting and inspirational event! We also had a team of wonderful volunteers and Suicide&Co staff who came together to cheer all the runners on, kitted out with maracas and whistles to make as much noise as possible! We are so grateful to everyone who came and supported us.
We would like to say a massive well done to everyone who took part, and collectively raised an incredible £36,323 which will fund over 1210 counselling sessions!!
If you are interested in taking part for us next year, please email us at info@suicideandco.org and we will email you next year when places become available!
Yorkshire Fair
We were so grateful to be the charity sponsor at the Three Amigas Christmas Fair in Yorkshire for the second year running! The Suicide&Co team travelled up and had a lovely time meeting people and discussing our work, whilst raising money for Suicide&Co through an entry fee and an amazing raffle with prizes kindly donated by the stall holders.
Thank you so much to everyone who was involved, we are so grateful for your support!
The Spirit of Christmas Fair
In November, we were so excited to have the privilege to be the Official Charity Partner for the Spirit of Christmas Fair at the Olympia in London for the second year running! We had so much fun managing the Shop and Drop, along with also selling raffle tickets for our raffle, which had really exciting prizes! Overall, we raised an incredible £32,884, beating our record-breaking total from last year! We would like to say a massive thank you to Olympia for having us back and supporting us in our mission to help those bereaved by suicide.
We had amazing support on each day of the fair from different corporates who volunteered to help us keep up with the busy Shop and Drop services.
During the week, we also hosted two amazing free-to-attend workshops: a wonderful candle-making workshop kindly put on by Emily from Yougi Botanicals, and a well-being panel with our amazing ambassador Shirley Ballas, Head Judge of Strictly Come Dancing, and Livvy Barry, founder of Livvy B Interiors, discussing wellbeing and breaking the stigma.
Thank you so much to everyone who participated during the week in a variety of different ways!
10 Before 10 x Step by Steppers
For November’s 10before 10 challenge, we partnered with the amazing Step by Stepper's run club to co-host a group run, kindly supported by Moju!
This was a really special way for us to meet new people and have important conversations surrounding grief, all whilst taking part in our 10 before 10 challenge, which is focused on prioritising our emotional and physical well-being.
Thank you so much to everyone who participated and supported the run!
2023
Our Organisation Support Membership
At the start of the year, our Organisation Support Membership had a rework to make it even more accessible. The membership provides HR and Leadership teams with the tools, guidance and processes to support team members in the case of an employee becoming bereaved by suicide (whether this be personal or work related) or an employee dying by suspected suicide.
The membership fee includes a login to our online platform with curated bereavement and incident response tools, guidance and processes and access to our team of experts. To enquire simply fill out this form.
10before10 Challenge Update
The #10before10 challenge is back with a new structure. Our community has grown massively over the last year, and so we have decided to expand the challenge to take place on the 10th of each month!
Walk 10,000 steps, before 10am on the 10th of the month. You’ll be joining a community of people, engaging with self-care, and raising money.
Sign up here to take part by making your donation, on a one off or monthly basis. Whatever the weather, we will stride together!
Marathon Des Sables - our biggest fundraisers!
Two of our incredible fundraisers, Duncan and George, took on the Marathon des Sables in April - a 6 day, 251km ultramarathon in southern Morocco in the Sahara Desert, widely regarded as the toughest foot race on earth! Duncan and George set themselves a huge fundraising target and raised an absolutely incredible £25,000.00 to help us support people bereaved by suicide, becoming our biggest fundraiser!
A new fundraising event: Our Pub (not in a pub) Quiz!
We hosted a new fundraising event at Lambeth Town Hall - our first Quiz Night! We had over 200 people in attendance, for a night of fun, putting our brains to the test, while raising money to support people bereaved by suicide. It was a great night to bring our community together.
Kind2Mind Match Fund Campaign
We were selected to be part of the Big Give Kind²Mind campaign! This was our first big appeal and match funding campaign, raising money to provide people bereaved by suicide with one to one bereavement counselling.
Donations to our campaign were matched for 7 days, starting from today the 15th of May to the 22nd of May, which was also during Mental Health Awareness Week. We exceeded our target and raised £11,611.00!! Thank you to everyone who donated and supported our first match funding campaign.
We have moved our Counselling Service in house!
Since our Counselling Service launched, we have now had 1000 applications, and to date we’ve delivered 3,194 sessions! To be able to continue to meet the demand for our service, we have recently grown our counselling team!
We have hired over 25 Counsellors, and have moved our service fully in-house to ensure we can provide the best service and keep up with demand.
&Co merchandise launch
We are excited to announce that we have launched some new merchandise products, with a new design look and feel under the brand of &Co! We plan to release lots of new products in the future under the new &Co sub-brand, but we are excited to say that we are launching now with Caps, new Words Unspoken Journals and Self Care and Affirmation Cards! Check them out on our shop here.
34k Challenge 2023
On World Suicide Prevention Day (September 10th), our annual 34k Challenge took place where we recruited 50+ incredible challengers take on the challenge, all across the country.
We smashed our target and had a total of 1290 individual donors who generously supported our fundraisers in the challenge, and helped us to raise a total of over £50,000, hugely exceeding our ambitious target! Check out the page here to see some photos of our challengers and sign up for 2024!
Global’s Make Some Noise Day
We were part of Global's Make Some Noise campaign for this year, and on the 6th of October it is Global's Make Some Noise Day where all of Global's radio stations raise money for 40 small charities - us being one of them! We also were lucky enough to go on LBC where our Co-Founders were interviewed along with some of our service users!
Spirit of Christmas 2023: Official Charity Partner!
We are excited to announce that we were the Official Charity Partner of the Spirit of Christmas Fair! We had a large stand where we sold merchandise, ran a raffle, had signposting areas and we will also ran the shop and drop!
This was brilliant for fundraising and awareness! In total we raised £21,000, breaking the record for a charity partner! Thanks to everyone who visited us!
Sidekick App Launch
We’ve just launched our FREE app, Sidekick by Suicide&Co, to support you through your suicide loss journey, providing both general mental health exercises, and personalised suicide bereavement specific resources. Each grief journey is unique, which is why this App includes a variety of resources to help you find the right support for you. Download on the Apple App Store.
Our 2023 Fundraising Gala
In November we held our second Fundraising Gala, hosted by Shirley Ballas! The Gala was a fantastic success, from Shirley Ballas, to our incredible dancers and a moving performance from one of our Ambassadors - it seemed to go by so quickly. It was a brilliant night of entertainment, brilliant conversations and fundraising for our community. We raised an incredible amount of £105,356.00 on the night, making a huge impact on the support we are able to provide. Thank you to our incredible guests who came.
Our Podcast has launched!
We’ve launched our Podcast, Conversations in Company; a podcast to make the suicide loss journey a little less lonely. We hope this podcast will create a valuable resource for people bereaved by suicide to resonate with and feel less alone in their grief.
Join our hosts, Isabelle and Ben as they address a different topic about coping with suicide loss, with the occasional special guest. Listen to Season One on Spotify or Apple.
Grief Awareness Week Webinars
This Grief Awareness Week for the first time we are hosting public webinars to share ideas about how to navigate these difficult times of the year around the Christmas period.
In these webinars we shared ideas about how to navigate difficult times of the year, created from listening to our community through a recent survey of over 200 people. We hosted 3 webinars and we had a brilliant turnout!
2022
( YOU ) ARE . ENOUGH Sweatshirts
In March 2022 we launched our Enough campaign and held our first in person event to celebrate - this was our first in person event due to launching in Covid! When wearing these sweatshirts, if you look in the mirror you will see the message ( I ) AM . ENOUGH, with the message of ( YOU ) ARE . ENOUGH on the back of the sweatshirt. The individual wearing is reminding themselves of this notion but is able to give the gift of self-confidence to anyone who sees them. Together we are strong enough; loud enough; bold enough; supportive enough to change the silence surrounding suicide-related grief!
600 applicants to our Counselling Service!
We've hit a major milestone at Suicide&Co - we have now received over 600 applications to our Counselling Service! We are seeing significant demand which is growing day by day, and we need all the help we can get to ensure we are able to provide support to as many people as possible.
As a small national start-up charity we are so proud to have reached 600 people who are in need of our support. As counselling is often inaccessible we are so glad to be able to offer potentially life changing support to these 600 people; but so many more people are in need of our services.
Rethink Mental Illness Grant
In June 2022 we were lucky enough to win a grant of £17,000 from Rethink Mental Illness, for our Words Unspoken Campaign! With this grant we were able to create a bespoke Out of Home campaign using billboards and screens to display the beautiful letters submitted to us by our community. We are planning to launch the campaign in October.
Summer of Internships
We’ve had some amazing candidates work with us over the summer months, working on a variety of projects for two weeks at a time. This was a brilliant way to work with interns to expand their skills and knowledge of the charity sector, and we will definitely be running our Internship Program again next year!
34k Challenge
On World Suicide Prevention Day we had our biggest fundraiser to date - The 34k Challenge! This year, we set ourselves the mission to recruit 34 people to take part in the 34k Challenge, and in the end we had 64 incredible individuals sign up and take on the challenge!
People were walking, running, cycling and completing 34km in their own unique ways (including skating, rowing and paddle boarding), up and down the country (and even a few abroad too!).
We hit our fundraising target and raised £34,000.00, which is absolutely incredible and a huge milestone for us as our biggest fundraiser yet!!
People's Postcode Lottery £25k
We are excited to announce that we have won the biggest grant we’ve won to date: £25,000 from People’s Postcode Lottery! This is unrestricted funding which is brilliant and will help us to continue to provide people bereaved by suicide with counselling.
Words Unspoken
We have created a new section of our website to showcase letters written by people bereaved by suicide, to the loved ones that they lost. The collection can be navigated by relationship and time since bereavement to help our community resonate with stories of others.
We have had over 200 letter submissions; 200 people sharing their stories of suicide loss, creating an incredible online resource for those bereaved by suicide to resonate with the stories of others and feel less alone. We will continue to build this collection and the submission link will remain open.
Spirit of Christmas
In November 2022 we attended the Spirit of Christmas Fair to sell our merchandise to fundraise, and continue to break down the stigma around the topic of suicide. We are so grateful to The Sophie Clarke Foundation who provided us with the funding to attend and lots of volunteers! Throughout the week we had lots of amazing conversations and raised £9,000.
Our First Fundraising Gala
On the 24th of November 2022 we held our first Fundraising Gala at the beautiful Church House in Westminster, where we are lucky enough to be tenants. This Gala was a black-tie event beginning at 6pm, including entertainment, an auction, and a delicious three course dinner.
It was an incredible night and we are so proud to say we raised £91,267! This exceeded expectations and we can’t thank everyone who attended enough.
2021
Our first year: What we have achieved
In our first year since the inception of Suicide&Co, we launched our website in July 2020 as a source of information; curating existing content, signposting to useful resources and highlighting lived experience. Soon after the launch of our website we started to fundraise through the creation of merchandise like our &Co bracelets with Coco&Kinney, our very first Advent Calendar, and then Volume 1 of our Prints!
After working hard to fundraise in the first few months, we were able to launch our Counselling Service in Feb 2021! We offer up to 12 free to access counselling sessions to anyone over 18, in England and Wales.
In March 2021, we held our first Suicide&Co fundraiser called #10before10 where we asked members of our community to walk 10,000 steps before 10am on 10 days in March.
In June 2021 we launched Our Conversation Guide, which contains advice and guidance on how to have conversations about suicide-related grief, for those bereaved and those supporting.
We are so proud that we were able to achieve all of this (and more) in our first year!
Suicide&Co Helpline!
In August 2021 we launched our Helpline! This is the first national suicide bereavement helpline run by bereavement counsellors, open Monday – Friday 9am-9pm. It can be accessed via telephone (0800 054 8400), email or webchat.
Suicide&Co’s 34k Challenge
In September 2021 we created our own fundraising challenge called the 34k Challenge, to raise awareness of the 34,146 people bereaved by suicide a year, and to raise money for our services. The challenge went really well and we had 5 people take part, raising over £6,500!
GSK Grow Program Grant
In November 2021 we won the GSK Grow Program Grant of £10,000 of unrestricted funding!! Along with this the program funded £3,000 worth of leadership training for our Co-Founders Emma and Amelia, which was an incredible opportunity.
Self-Care Advent Calendar and Volume 2 Prints
In December 2021 we brought our self-care advent calendars back for another year, this time with a focus on lyrics and a daily playlist! Again, we then turned the beautiful illustrations from each day of advent into prints!
