Dear friends and family,

As a parent of 3 children and a governor of my former school I’ve been involved with education in some capacity for the last 5yrs. It has been a wonderful experience that has also opened my eyes to some of the challenges children face today.

Chief among them is the impact on their lives of smartphones. If you’ve read Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation” or are a parent to pre-teen/early teen children I’m sure you’ll be aware of the danger to children’s mental health from a) spending too much time on smartphones and b) not enough time playing outdoors In Real Life…!

The benefits of spending more time outdoors are clear, and it is not a surprise that if you ask someone where their favourite place is, close to 100% will name somewhere outside. Yet shockingly 3 in 4 children spend less time outdoors than prison inmates. This is a stat I’d like to change, and something you can help with too, by supporting The Outward Bound trust.

Why Outward Bound?

Every year Outward Bound take over 25,000 young people from all communities and challenge them to take part in a wide range of outdoor activities across the UK. These include everything from hill walking to rock climbing, wild swimming to sea kayaking, all with the aim of instilling a sense of adventure, aspiration, resilience and confidence. Importantly it also takes them away from their phones!

Outward Bound never lets financial circumstance stand in the way, with 80% of beneficiaries receiving some level of financial assistance to attend a course at one of 6 outdoor centres across the UK. It is especially children from less affluent backgrounds, who tend to spend more time on phones, that benefit most from an Outward Bound course.

What am I doing to deserve all this generosity from you?

Inspired by my cousin Tom who heroically swam the channel last year I thought I’d pick up the next leg of the long distance family triathlon by riding the length of Britain from Land's End to John O'Groats. This will be done over 9 days in September, averaging c.110miles a day and climbing a cumulative 53k feet (nearly 2x Mt Everest) with nights spent under canvas. Hopefully it’s a worthy challenge. I’m assured it won’t be comfortable…

Thank you so much for reading and thank you for your donations. They really will make a huge impact into transforming the lives of young people and will spur me on from those brutal 20% gradient hills in Cornwall to the long uphill drags of the Cairngorms!

Henry