Stormbreak's Summer Challenge Uses Technology to Fight Mental Health

On Saturday 1st August, mental health charity Stormbreak, with the support of BBC Children in Need’s A Million and Me programme, will be launching their new interactive, sector leading platform, encouraging families to introduce some mentally healthy movement into their daily routine. 

The coronavirus pandemic and ensuing closure of schools has meant that increased isolation for children and young people has amplified the need to teach mentally healthy coping skills from a young age. To help provide this support, Talk Think Do, Stormbreak’s lead strategic and digital agency, quickly developed a strategy and a solution that would allow the charity to pivot their offering and host all of their support online. This means that children will be able to access this valuable programme from home, school or community spaces. Not only this, but the solution would also provide Stormbreak with the opportunity to scale at speed and reach new audiences.  

This new platform has been crafted with a user first approach, making it accessible, inclusive, visually engaging and a frictionless experience. The playful characters represent the five mental well-being pillars (resilience, relationships, self-worth, self-care, hope and optimism), and there is also a reward mechanism that encourages users to stay active. 

Using progressive technology and working methods, Talk Think Do implemented a full DevOps approach and built the entire infrastructure using Pulumi – an open source platform for modern cloud architectures. Hosted in Microsoft Azure, with a custom-built API that links to a tracker for users to provide valuable feedback in a playful way. The tracker itself enables the programme to adapt to the user needs and supports scientific research that is being carried out by Bournemouth University. 

And now, Stormbreak can continue to support children and bring families together to support mental health through movement. Launching on Saturday 1st August at the stormbreak website, trusted adult networks will be able to sign up and get access to a wealth of video content to help support children with sustainable, transferable skills and coping strategies through mentally healthy movement. 

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 five-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.” 

Dan Meineck, CTO Talk Think Do,: “As a trusted partner for Stormbreak, we are very proud to support such a worthy cause and are very excited to see this fabulous platform launch to the world. We have used some innovative new tech to host the limitless content, make future iterations quick and easy, track the engagement and have the ability to meet the increased demand for their service – future proofing the charity’s offering. We will continue to support Stormbreak moving forward with our strategy and technical expertise.”

Check out stormbreak.org.uk and take part in the ‘Summer Challenge’ and help children develop sustainable well-being, transferable skills and coping strategies.