Hector’s House – our chosen charity for 2020

If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ll know that one of the reasons we founded Equipp was to provide support to teenage mental health charities. As mums of teens, with a business firmly aimed at the teenage market, we wanted our charity efforts to be all about supporting young adults and although there are so many great causes out there, we all know that teenage mental health support is under-funded, under-valued and needs all the attention it can get.

We were proud to support Signpost from day one. Signpost is a fantastic local charity which provides counselling, coaching and support to young people. Recently, however, it’s been successful in gaining some big corporate donations – yay!

So it seemed a perfect time to look around for another local charity who was doing amazing work. We’d had Hector’s House at the back of our minds for a while, as Louise had met the family behind it through Chiltern Dog Rescue and her daughter Emily worked with Hector’s sister Lottie at dog training classes.

Hector’s House was set up by Hector Stringer’s family after he took his own life at the age of 18. It aims to make it easier to recognise the symptoms which may lead to suicide, stop stigma around mental health issues and help everyone have access to the mental health support they need to ensure people don’t ever reach the point of suicide.

One of the main focuses of its work is the eat-move-love campaign, which makes it easy to take small steps to tackle mental health issues. They have had great success in visiting schools, events and festivals to talk about both this and the symptoms of suicidal behaviour and mental health issues.