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Have you ever been lost? Totally stuck? Grasping for something? So much so that you’ve sat in front of your computer, not knowing what to type into Google, not knowing where to look, so you’ve simply typed ‘help’. You had no idea how to square that work situation that was escalating, you didn’t know how to get beyond the heartbreak of losing someone you love, you didn’t have a clue how to get your aging parents to listen to any of your well-thought out advice, your boss was driving you crazy, your kids equally so, and you were knackered beyond compare. So, you just typed ‘help’. And really what you were doing was looking for the answer to a really simple question: ‘What can I do?’ But the answer still didn’t come.

If Lost Start Here attempts to answer that question by exploring each week exactly what you can do. We’ll cover a café that deals with anxiety, a museum that can teach us about empathy, a group of blokes hanging out in their sheds. We’ll get to an organization that offers mental health walks, another that focuses on getting out of our heads and into nature. We’ll feature a festival that encourages creativity, a community allotment project that takes on aging, and a collaborative art project that invites participants to make connections, material and otherwise.

This platform will focus on what we believe is an emerging new sector that’s all about how to be a person in the world. This includes initiatives that range from inspired classes and smart idea sessions, to hands-on practice studios and maker sessions. Initiatives that have arisen across different sectors, away from just wellness to the domains of culture, science, and the humanities. Initiatives that are people-centered, have a deep appreciation of experience and design, are open and accessible to all, and are often playful. Initiatives that represent something that people can return back to, again and again, and offer a longer-term relationship to making something work better (so not the quick-fixes).

Other people, or maybe you, are building the frameworks and creating the structures to help people negotiate their lives, from multiple perspectives and in very different ways than what went before. There’s a sector developing that’s aims at helping our emotional and psychological well-being, but it hasn’t yet been pulled together as an effective and necessary response to all our life’s problems.  

If Lost Starts Here attempts to do just that, to respond to the conundrum of tons of advice, shifting evidence and approaches, and the very real question of where and how you can actually do this. As you read through, your bit is to find the thing that appeals to you, to show up to something and see how it goes. To engage.

So, let’s get started…