Our CEO takes part in innovative lived experience spokesperson programme

Recently our CEO Anna Wardley spent three days on an intensive Sound Delivery media residential in Leamington Spa as part of the Sound Delivery Spokesperson Programme 2022.

Anna was selected to take part in the nine-month programme which is designed to amplify the voices of people with lived experience of a wide range of social issues.

“It’s been incredibly inspiring to spend this time with 13 other people working to create change in their respective areas as diverse as addiction and sex work, to disability and asylum seeker rights.”

Here Anna shares why she thinks it is important for our voices to be heard as spokespeople and how this programme is helping us achieve that goal.

During the residential, Anna wrote a blog entitled “Why I’m putting a spotlight on parental suicide as a public spokesperson”

Here is an extract below:

“It is estimated that more than 25 children lose a parent to suicide every day in the UK, according to childhood bereavement charity Winston’s Wish. Despite a degree of de-stigmatisation around some mental health issues, there is still a high level of stigma around a person with children ending their own life. This remains a persistent taboo in a world where the ‘it’s okay not to be okay’ mantra has become commonplace.

Our failure to talk about parental suicide doesn’t stop it from happening and we know that across the UK each year many thousands of children are left to cope with the lifelong impact of their parent or primary caregiver taking their own life. It’s impossible to be more specific about how many are affected as nobody counts them, another by-product of the prevailing stigma faced by children left behind after suicide. I am one of them. “

You can read the full blog over on the Sound Delivery website here.

You can find out more about Sound Delivery here.