By Brian Urwin, Life President THM
A healthy workforce creates, healthier, higher-performing and empowered organisations
In the beginning
2005-2016
Working our way through the alphabet, we have had a progression of very meaningful abbreviations, from PLC to BiY and now THM.
Our story starts 15 years ago in 2005 with the formation of Personalised Learning in Communities (PLC) which emerged from a coaching collaboration with several young people and an ambitious mission to help young people to achieve their aims within communities. The company was very successful in empowering community groups and achieving grants and funding for projects, including one ambitious project to set up a Basketball Club in Medway from scratch.
Believe in You (BiY) – a Community Interest Company was the next step on our journey in 2012 – our mission was to support young people in Kent and help them to identify and achieve their life potential by developing their life skills and preparing them to excel in the world of work by empowering them with Lifelong Learning skills, tools and techniques.
At this time we were heavily focussed on coaching and mentoring but as time went by the BiY customer base gradually broadened beyond focussing just on the needs of young people and by 2014 we were running highly successful mindfulness and stress buster workshops for the business community working in collaboration with associate Lotus Nguyen.
At this time we ran a multi-generational event with teenagers right through to people in their 80s and used a Values exercise. The outcome was stark and gave us a huge insight into the importance of health and well-being for everyone.
All of the older generation rated Health as their number 1 value, most of the middle generation had Health in their top 5 values but it did not feature at all for the young people, who valued materialistic things as far more important. Powerful learning which revealed a lot about young people’s view that they can take their health for granted!
2017-2019
In March 2017 we held an interactive workshop aimed at raising awareness of health and well-being in East Kent communities. The output from this was very powerful and included the recommendation that we should find ways to support businesses to look after their employee’s health and well-being. The concept for Think Healthy Me (THM) was therefore born.
The current Board first met in 2019 to discuss setting up the new company.
2020
Here we are in 2020 with Think Healthy Me Ltd successfully registered with Companies House in mid-April with 20 talented, professional Health and well-being Associates and we are ready, living in lockdown as a result of Covid-19, to support employers to create higher performing, healthier and empowered organisations across Kent.
2021
In 2021 we became Think Healthy Me C.I.C. This allows us to apply for grants and funding to support our projects.