Film - The Death Project

When I was setting up Silent Cities, I was lucky enough to earn a place at the School for Social Entrepreneurs, Yorkshire.

The first cohort of The School for Social Entrepreneurs, Yorkshire including Jay Baker from Silence Breaker Media and John Pickin from Neighbours Can Help.

After leaving the agency, I had a pretty dark period, but the weekly meet ups in Leeds for SSE forced me to leave the house and kept me going.  I will always be eternally grateful to my fellow SSE students and especially Amalia Booker, the director of the school at the time, and David. 

As part of the programme, we had a residential at Dartington Hall in Devon with other SEE students from across the UK.

We got put into teams - like a social enterprise ‘Apprentice’ - and had three days to come up with a social enterprise idea for the area.

I came up with the idea of the Death Project - breaking the last taboo of the West ‘taking death to the high-street!’

In two hours, I pulled together a short promotional video to show as part of our pitch using whatever footage I had on my Mac at the time. This was a version of the video, which still makes me smile and I’d quite like to show at my funeral!

We came runner up, which I was gutted about, but I still have my plastic gold cup in my bedroom as one of my happiest memories of working with these wonderful people.

Years later, it’s great to see projects such as Death Cafes really taking off. Shows we were onto summat (and that we really should have come first. Not that I’m still bitter or anything!)