Back in 2022, the seed of an idea was planted at a Big Ideas Day. The team wanted to focus on youth mental health, and they named themselves GROWTH (you’ll find out why shortly!).

A successful Regional Final saw GROWTH land a place at the Big Ideas Programme National Final 2022 at the Houses of Parliament, where they shared their plans for creating supportive social media content, facilitating creative workshops, and encouraging outdoor activities.

Fast forward to 2025, and Matt, one of the team’s founding members, returned to the Houses of Parliament to talk about GROWTH’s flourishing journey since that National Final. He celebrated their successes, shared their challenges, and talked about the power of resilience.

In this blog post, we share his powerful words and celebrate the impressive journey that GROWTH continues to take…

Hello everyone! First of all, I want to say that it’s been awesome hearing all of your great ideas – you should all be proud of yourselves.  As Sarah said, I am Matt and I’m a co-founder of GROWTH which is an organisation that focuses on educating young people about mental health, by promoting the benefits of nature, creativity and exercise.

So, let me tell you a little bit about what we do. Our main focus is hosting free workshops for kids aged 4-12 where we have important discussions around mental health, coping strategies and how to help others.

Many kids don’t understand why they feel the way they do which can make life pretty confusing and stressful and can cause knock on effects into adulthood. So, our aim is to equip as many young people as possible with the tools and knowledge to understand and manage how they feel, before they encounter challenges like moving up to secondary school etc. instead of when they are older and have already developed unhealthy coping strategies and beliefs. But don’t worry, we make it fun! In our sessions we include sports challenges, games, drawing, and videos to be as engaging as possible for all ages.

GROWTH stands for Growth, Revival, Outdoors, Wellbeing, Togetherness and Health and our tagline is ‘determined to make people smile’.  And that has been our main goal really since we started.  Each of us has struggled with our mental health and back when we started, we could see how many young people were struggling too, especially because of the recent lockdowns. They felt isolated, anxious and some seemed to feel hopeless and with large gaps in the education system around mental health awareness in schools, they didn’t know what to do. From then on, it became our mission to help educate and support the kids in our local community, to give them confidence and an understanding of how they feel so they can live happier and healthier lives and help people around them do so too.

So, when it came to the National Finals and we didn’t win, I won’t lie to you, it wasn’t a great feeling, but we weren’t going to give up. We believed in our idea and enjoyed working on something we cared about so much and so we took our loss as an opportunity to prove ourselves and to reflect on our work and find new ways to improve what we were doing.

And so, since 2022, we have: spoken at an international conference, raised over £1000 to fund our projects by holding stalls at local fetes and fairs, hosted workshops at local youth groups (in fact we have one in two weeks), built a loyal following of over 450 people across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, built a wellness garden at our old secondary school where we also started a wellbeing ambassador program which has continued despite us no longer being there, created videos on important topics to share to schools and on social media, and interviewed numerous young people as part of our upcoming campaign to promote the benefits of hobbies and exercise, not to mention our plans for a children’s book series and maybe world domination. So yeah, I guess you could say we’ve been rather busy.

From the first “Big Ideas” workshop at school where it all began, our idea has changed drastically, from entire community centre blueprints, to training therapy dogs and of course, the many projects we are up to now. But with these changes in plans, concepts, complete shifts in our goals and even new team members joining, one thing never has changed and that is our passion and pure dedication for our mission: making people smile.

Everything we have achieved, we’ve done by ourselves. We’ve tried to avoid help from adults as much as possible to show that no matter how young you are, as long as you have that foundation of passion and a drive to achieve your goals, the only way is up. We started with no funding, no followers and zero experience but with hard work and a lot of mistakes – or as my mum likes to call them “learning experiences”- we’ve built something we couldn’t be prouder of.

So even if you don’t win today or your plans change a hundred times or even perhaps your idea was so big that it may be one for the future, I encourage you to face every opportunity and hurdle life throws at you with the same enthusiasm and tenacity that you have shown this program as it will not only change your life but also give you the opportunity to make the world that little bit more brighter because at the end of the day, a good idea is a good idea.