stormbreak is a children’s mental health charity led by Dr Martin Yelling – a former teacher and international athlete. The aim of the charity is to equip young people with sustainable, transferable skills and coping strategies to thrive during the complex demands of growth into adult life.
A successful stormbreak pilot programme was launched in five schools in the South West in October 2019. It was extended to 15 schools at the start of 2020, until the onset of Covid-19 put the UK into lockdown. This meant that ‘stormbreaks’ could no longer be provided face-to-face in a classroom setting. Not only that, but the increased isolation for children and young people during the pandemic further amplified the need to teach mentally healthy coping skills from a young age. For the charity to continue their work, they needed to find a way to reach young people at home.
An easily accessible, sector leading platform, with the power to pivot and scale at speed.
As stormbreak’s lead strategic and digital agency, Talk Think Do quickly developed a strategy and a solution that would allow the charity to pivot their offering and host all of their support online. Using progressive technology and working methods, we worked closely with the team and partners at stormbreak to create a website that engages children and brings families together to tackle mental health through movement. The platform provides the charity with a way of hosting limitless video activities, content and support that could reach children and families across the globe.
This new platform has been crafted with a user first approach, making it accessible, inclusive, visually engaging and a frictionless experience. Playful characters are used to represent the five mental well-being pillars (resilience, relationships, self-worth, self-care, hope and optimism), and there is also a reward system that encourages users to stay active.
Another key element of the build was to introduce the ability to track the progress of individuals when they completed a session. Developing a bespoke API to store these activities – linked to a separate tracker – users are able to rate the activity they have carried out using a simple emoji system. This feedback mechanism helps stormbreak to adapt its offering and use it to support scientific research being carried out by Bournemouth University.
Talk Think Do implemented a full DevOps approach building the entire infrastructure using Pulumi – an open source platform for modern cloud architectures. This gives stormbreak the ability to scale up at speed and make future changes quickly and easily with fast deployments. Hosted in Microsoft Azure, the solution also provides stormbreak with the flexibility they need to grow their offering along with increased demand for their services.
Not only has the platform solved an immediate problem caused by Covid-19, making it possible for the charity to continue to support young people and their families while schools are closed, but it has advanced stormbreak’s mission to extend their support to a wider audience for generations to come.
Dr Martin Yelling, Founder and CEO stormbreak:
“We know that now is an important time to reach children, and supporting their current and future mental health is timely. The team at Talk Think Do has been instrumental in helping us to adapt and improve our offering so that we can now reach children with impact on a wider scale, fast forwarding to our 5-year mission! The team are true experts in their field and have worked tirelessly to deliver a world-class system, which will help us support mental health in young people for many years to come.”
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