Charity podcast -Headway Essex

I thought we should get Headway Essex in because you are celebrating a birthday this year, 2026.

How many years has Headway Essex been running?

Yeah, we are celebrating a big birthday.

So we've been running 40 years now.

So we're stretching it out as long as we possibly can to celebrate our 40th birthday.

Fantastic.

Yeah, so 40 or something.

And that's 1986.

I'm thinking I'm at high school.

I'm in Essex.

In fact, I'm in school in Colchester.

And that is where one of your offices is based.

Am I right?

Yeah, so that's where we started out back in the day.

So it was actually 1985.

So we are prolonging it a little bit.

So we're in our 40th year.

So we're celebrating that.

And yeah, we started out in Colchester originally.

So it actually came about by a gentleman named John was playing football when he sustained a quite serious traumatic brain injury and And he and his wife, Sarah, quite quickly realised that there's a real lack of support at that time for people with acquired brain injury.

And they then sort of set out and put all their efforts into changing that, which is really, really impressive.

So they actually just started out with a support group originally, which actually had around 40 attendees.

So it just goes to show for a first support group, that's quite significant, isn't it? And yeah, it all kind of went from there, really.

So they started that out under the kind of umbrella of Headway UK at the time.

And they actually started it out rather than Headway Essex.