We are proud to introduce The Crew, our most ambitious project to date. The Crew aims to tackle community, health, fitness and individual goals and provide a support framework to empower all those involved.
CHAPTER 1
Meet the 8 brave participants who make up the group - their hopes, motivations, obstacles and fears as they embarked on this journey a few months ago.
We launched the application process for the Crew back in January of this year. This project was inspired by feedback we were getting from you, our community. Covid and the trends that have developed as result have had a significant impact on all of us.
We knew this project would resonate with people but weren’t expecting close to 1,000 people to apply to be a part of the programme. While it was encouraging to see we had struck a chord with people, it was also devastating to see the number of people that needed help.
On top of the feedback and trends we were observing, there are also wider trends at play and huge amounts of research have started to come out recently which show really concerning experiences for a lot of people in their daily lives. Ireland is now officially the loneliest country in Europe, according to research recently published by the European Commission.
A massive 13.7% of Irish people said they feel alone most or all of the time. That’s tough to read but when you think of the knock on health effects of loneliness then it is even more devastating. The World Health Organisation has identified loneliness as our biggest health threat and that long-term loneliness could impact someone’s health as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Hear more discussion on the same topics in the latest Gym+Coffee Podcast episode. Diarmuid sits down with Ronan Conway, a Team Development & Self-Development Coach. Ronan has facilitated all of the workshops for The Crew and has been guiding everyone through the program to discover their goals and their challenges to overcome.