The South North Adventure: A Celebration of Young People’s Resilience

The final member of the team is Gary Hutchings. Gary hails from north Devon, where he runs his own business, and is also a highly accomplished ocean rower and adventurer.

Kevin finally managed to persuade his wife, Elaine, also a psychologist and mental health researcher, to help organize this epic adventure – his greatest accomplishment of all! We are both passionate about making this adventure a festival of young people’s resilience and mental health and aim to develop a unique research project based on what young people, themselves, have to say. It’s all about listening to their aims, their ideas, their objectives. We want to bring the lived experience of the nation’s youth into the heart of the research process and couldn’t think of a better partner than MQ – The Mental Health Research Charity to bring this to fruition. More on that later.

The team will start by rowing about 300 miles from Les Minquiers to Portsmouth, via Jersey, and then from Scrabster, in the north of Scotland, to Out Stack. In the interim, they will cycle around 900 miles on land on their custom-made tandem rickshaw from Portsmouth Harbour to Scrabster.

We reached out to 10 wonderful charity partners (https://givestar.io/gs/south-north-adventures-supports-youth-mental-health) who agreed to work with the team. The idea is that Kevin and the boys will chat to young people at our 10 charity ‘meet and greets’ throughout the country to discuss what they think mental health researchers should be investigating. We will then prepare a research proposal after the adventure and aim to pursue these questions in a scientifically valid study. We hope that the nation will get behind the team in this epic adventure and celebration of young people’s resilience.

All of our charity partners are involved with supporting young people in one way or another. In Jersey, the team will meet people from Every Child Our Future who this year are highlighting the importance of reading books and stories for mental health and developing resilience. On a similar theme, the 1851 Trust whom they will meet in Portsmouth emphasize the role of education and critical thinking skills in giving young people a step up in life. Then it’s off to London on the tandem-rickshaw where they will speak with young people from Women in Sport about the role of sport and physical activity in building confidence and resilience in young girls; the Big Kid Foundation will be waiting in Brixton to discuss the impact of knife crime among young people and how we might be able to reduce it. Their patron, chef Michel Roux, will present the team with a frozen boeuf bourguignon to be consumed when they complete the journey. From Brixton, it’s off to Oxford, accompanied part of the way by Susie Dent, patron of Guide Dogs, who will cycle alongside the team and introduce them to young visually impaired people where they will discuss ways they deal with this type of adversity. It’s then on to Sheffield where the team plan to arrive during the World Snooker Championship where several leading players will introduce them to their chosen charity Jessie May, who are supporting end of life care for young people facing terminal illness. Kevin will interview young people and their families about how they cope with this worst of adversities. The team will then head to the small Yorkshire village of Bramhope where they have been promised a cream tea by the triathete Brownlee brothers and a visit to the Brownlee Foundation who are also using physical activity and sport to build resilience in young people. Along the way, the team will be accompanied by Bikeability and Heavy Metal Truants who focus on cycling and physical activity to boost wellbeing.