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!
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!
