- Celia Mae Jones
Best-selling author, Matt Haig, will be donating over £7,000 of the proceeds of his latest book, The Comfort Book to Grassroots Suicide Prevention.
Matt will be putting part of this already incredible donation towards The Big Give’s Christmas Challenge 2021 – an annual matched funding campaign where any donation made to the charity will be doubled. One donation, twice the impact.
Matt has written openly about his own experience with suicidal thoughts and how he overcame them in the Sunday Times number one best seller, Reasons to Stay Alive. His most recent book is about finding hope and reassurance when going through a dark time, something that Grassroots Suicide Prevention’s work is centred around.
Matt says, “I will be donating to Grassroots Suicide Prevention, as I feel they offer far more practical support than I ever could. I just want to try and make some people feel a tiny bit less alone.
Grassroots Suicide Prevention do invaluable, practical work that makes a difference in the real world. They are dedicated to helping prevent suicide and offer training and education to thousands of people and organisations. I’m proud to support them in The Big Give’s Christmas Challenge.”
“Grassroots Suicide Prevention do invaluable, practical work that makes a difference in the real world. I’m proud to support them in The Big Give’s Christmas Challenge.”
– Matt Haig
Rachael Swann, Grassroots Suicide Prevention CEO says, “Matt has worked with us before, and we are so grateful for his ongoing support. Over the last two years, we have had a significant increase for the needs of all our services, including over 200% increase in requests for mental health and suicide prevention training courses. So, Matt’s decision to have his donation matched through The Big Give means that he has doubled the resources to help further our vital life-saving work.”
Research shows that mental health issues rise over Christmas as it can be a time of isolation and loneliness for many. Our work helps remind people how valuable their life is, and suicide is not their only option. The Big Give is an amazing opportunity to raise money to save more lives.
We hope to raise over £15,000 in total, which will put life-saving skills in the centre of communities. It will go towards developing our award-winning Stay Alive app, providing suicide and self-harm resources to frontline workers, and delivering mental health training courses and expertise to businesses and organisations.
For example, Grassroots Suicide Prevention worked with the skateboarding community to deliver two Suicide First Aid courses: the first for Slam City Skates – one of London’s biggest skate shops and teams; the second for skate team managers around the UK. We taught them how to spot and support people in crisis, understand the causes and risk factors, ask the right questions, how to listen and respond.
Watch the video below to hear their review of the course: