Honest talk on inclusivity and wellbeing, on both sides of the lanyard – A new column by Chantal Mendes, Head of Event Strategy, HeadBox
Back in 2012, the year London hosted the Olympics, I started working for Time to Change, the campaign helping tackle stigma and discrimination around mental health, through campaigns, events and policy change.
Nobody made me share my own story as part of that job. I didn’t have to stand up in front of rooms full of strangers from corporates, government bodies or non-profits, and talk about the years I’d spent hiding a mental illness so completely that even the people closest to me didn’t know how bad it had gotten. I chose to, over and over, because I wanted to see things change and I believed hearing it from someone who’d lived it was the only thing that actually moved people. It gave people the permission to feel safe to share their experience too.
I was a master at masking everything that was really going on. Full makeup, outfit sorted, not a hair out of place, because some days that armour was the only thing standing between me and leaving the house at all. I was terrified, for most of my twenties, that if anyone at work ever found out, it would be the end of how they saw me professionally. So I didn’t tell anyone, until I had no choice, and had to explain to my employer why I wouldn’t be able to come to work for a few weeks as I was starting inpatient treatment at The Priory.
They were kind about it. Genuinely, unremarkably kind. And that mattered more than I can easily explain, because I had spent years assuming the opposite would happen.
That was over a decade ago now, and a lot has genuinely changed in workplace culture since. Mental health at work is a boardroom topic in a way it simply wasn’t back then.
But I don’t think our industry has kept pace with the rest of the workplace world it sits alongside. Events still runs on a culture where showing strain reads as a weakness, long after most other sectors stopped treating it that way in public, at least.
Which is why this year’s World Mental Health Day theme lands so squarely on us. Set by the World Health Organization and the World Federation for Mental Health, it’s “Lived experiences heard: real voices, real change.”
It’s a pointed theme, more pointed than most. It isn’t really about raising awareness anymore, most workplaces are well past needing convincing that mental health matters. It’s about who gets to shape what happens once the awareness-raising is done. The WHO’s own framing on this is blunt: people are routinely asked to share their story, and then quietly excluded from the room where a decision gets made about it.
Swap “policy” for “programme” and that’s an uncomfortably accurate description of how our industry still handles lived experience.
We’ve gotten reasonably good, in places, at designing for people; quiet rooms, dietary flexibility, step-free routes, content notes on sessions that need them. All genuinely good. But notice the verb. Designing for, not designing with. Most of that thinking still happens in a planning meeting among people who don’t have the condition, disability, or circumstance being accommodated, working from a checklist rather than a conversation with someone who’s lived it.
But every so often, an event gets this properly right, and it’s worth naming what that actually looks like.
A friend of mine who works in events spent last week crewing at a fundraising challenge event for Bigmoose, the kind built entirely around strangers pushing themselves for a cause bigger than any of them.
This year, her role shifted to also looking after the crew, not just participants, and on the first evening she found herself standing up to share her own story with the whole group, participants and crew together. She told me afterwards that she said yes because she wanted people to know they weren’t alone, and to understand what they were really raising money for. Her reasoning for pushing through the fear was simple: sharing what she’d been through couldn’t hurt her, but it might help someone else. She was proud, she said, of being willing to be that vulnerable in front of strangers. By the end of the week, several runners had come up to tell her that remembering her story was what got them through the hardest moments, when they needed reminding why they were out there in the first place.
That’s what “real voices, real change” looks like operationally. Not a wellbeing policy circulated by email. Someone with genuine lived experience, given an actual platform, inside a live event, in front of the people it could help most.
Which events are you hosting or attending this month, that’s a useful filter to apply on the show floor: how many of the wellbeing and accessibility conversations happening there involve someone with lived experience actually in the room, rather than someone presenting a solution on their behalf?
So, a few things worth trying, on both sides of the lanyard:
1. Bring lived experience in at the brief, not the feedback form. If you’re designing a wellbeing or accessibility element, find someone with direct experience of the thing you’re designing for and ask them before you’ve decided the shape of the solution, not after you’ve built it and want validation.
2. Give crew and freelancers a platform, not just a survey. My friend’s story worked because someone handed her a microphone, not a feedback form. If your only mechanism for hearing from delivery teams is an anonymous post-event survey, you’re collecting data, not lived experience.
3. Make disclosure safe before you ask for it. I only told my employer the truth when I had no other option, and I was braced for the worst. If people on your team are quietly calculating the professional cost of being honest, they won’t be, and you’ll never know what you’re missing.
4. Close the loop, visibly. The fastest way to make lived-experience input feel extractive rather than meaningful is to ask for it and never show what changed because of it. Even a short “here’s what we heard, here’s what we did differently” costs nothing and is rarely done.
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I think about that Time to Change work often, over a decade on now, and about my friend on that stage last week, and about how much of what actually changes things starts with one person deciding to say the true thing out loud in front of people who could use it.
Real voices, real change was written with health policy in mind. But it’s a fair test for events too: whose voice actually changed something you built this year? If our industry is still asking that question a decade after the wider workplace stopped needing to, we’re the ones who’ve fallen behind, not the theme.
If this piece has raised anything for you, Samaritans are available free, any time, on 116 123.