ROUND FOR REACH 2024
The Reach Foundation
When Jim Stynes and Paul Currie founded the Reach Foundation back in 1994, mental health wasn’t really ‘a thing’. For two young men to come into a space which was then, very much uncharted territory and encourage young people to build resilience and meaningful connections in their lives, was a complete game changer. One that paved the way for countless other organisations with a similar mission, to step into this space and play as well.
We proudly partnered with The Reach Foundation and Melbourne Football Club to produce the 2024 Round for Reach Campaign, marking the 30th year anniversary of Jim Stynes’ legacy and Reach’s biggest milestone yet.
This year’s theme, It started with Jim, it continues with you, pays tribute to a legacy like no other, while passing the baton onto the community to continue supporting Reach’s preventative mental health work for another 30 years and beyond.
SYNOPSIS
PROBLEM
Young people are still being held back today by the same fears and pressures that they were in 1994 when Reach began. Body image, negative self-talk and poor self-esteem are front runners, whilst trying to juggle the extreme pressures of fitting in with the crowd, and being your own person at the same time is only amplified by things like social media.
Young people consume a barrage of unrealistic, highly edited content on a daily basis.
The make-believe world of social media and the glossy covers of magazines paint a warped picture of what an amazing life should look like, while “influencers” offer us handy tips on how to fix ourselves, emphasising all of the things we never knew we needed to fill a void we didn’t know we had. All the while slowly damaging the self esteem of impressionable young minds, swipe by swipe, click by click.
WATCH THE CAMPAIGN
“When young people work with young people, it’s a very powerful dynamic”
- JIM STYNES
APPROACH
In order to truly understand the challenges young people faced 30 years ago, versus right now, it was important for us to gather this information first hand. To do this, we first had to explore some of the issues young people were trying to navigate from 1994 (when Reach was first founded) onwards. This required taking a little trip down memory lane (or a Reach rabbit hole if you will), through countless hours of archival footage, where Jim Stynes & Co-Founder Paul Currie, facilitated some of their earliest breakthrough moments with young adolescents, which completely changed the landscape for mental health initiatives across Australia.
We then spoke with a number of current Reach facilitators and crew members aged between 14 - 25, and it was quickly apparent that despite the improvement of awareness around mental health, that all of these issues not only still exist for young people today, but are completely exacerbated by the unrealistic expectations of social media.
Through the supporting voices of Melbourne Football Club’s, Max Gawn, Saraid Taylor & Jake Melksham, the campaign explores the detrimental effects that social media and a world that’s filled with superficial noise has on young people, and how Reach, three decades on, is still creating spaces for them to be the best versions of themselves, without judgment.
As Reach Crew members Hattie & Lockie openly shared some of their struggles, it was important for us to balance this out with a glimpse of Max Gawn’s own experience of growing up, before working with Jim Stynes. We believed this would help demonstrate a more human side to Gawn in the eyes of young people who look up to him as a footy icon and role model.
The 2024 Round for Reach returned to the MCG this year, where the campaign video was premiered on the big screen and throughout the broadcast. A number of other assets were rolled out to support the campaign, including social media teasers and out of home digital screens across Melbourne.
