Aretha - Our Next Project/ Cause

We’re back in the Northern Hemisphere now. After more than a year in the Southern Hemisphere, we’ve crossed the equator heading North and are making good progress towards Grenada. By the time we finish this adventure we will have spent an incredible 2 years together as family, all of us having learnt from it in our own different ways. For Nichola and I spending this intense time as a family we have seen the effect this has had on us and our children, not always easy, but something we wouldn’t want to change.

Well, we’ve been talking for quite some time about what we should plan to do next. In my last email I promised I’d update on the first part of our plans for after we complete our sailing adventure.

We plan to launch a new business and have been talking through the ideas of what that business is going to look like. We have had so many ideas but I think we are now set on what the business is going to relate to - more to come later.

However, maybe as a result of our adventure, what is more important is what we would like to do alongside the business. We knew from the outset that whatever the business was that we started we wanted it to contribute to others - in particular to help children. What we hadn’t worked out was which children and in what ways could be offer help.

As you might imagine, Nichola and I have had a lot of time together on our long passages at sea, time when we have had the opportunity to talk to each other at length. We realised that even after 20 years together we had something in common that neither of us had really discussed before. Both of us have experienced bullying at school. It’s a strange thing as neither of us had ever really talked about it before. Having had time together at sea, we’ve talked at length and realise the destruction of self confidence that can come from being bullied - it’s something we both dealt with in different ways and we’ve both come out of it stronger and in a position now where we want to help others.

So for our next venture, the key thing we would like to do is to donate 50% of the profits from our new business to helping children who are bullied and to give children the confidence and life skills to help them deal with bullying. Bullying touches many people yet so few people talk about it and bury it deep inside themselves. We want to make a difference. We want children to live confident lives, to be different, to do their own thing without being persecuted.

Back when we were at school, the internet didn’t exist. The world we live in today is far worse for bullying. Stories circulate of cyber bullying. There are multiple ways that children can be bullied and its extremely public in social media. There are horror stories of children who’ve been driven to suicide.

We haven’t worked out all the details of our business yet, but what we do have is a very clear cause of why we want to start a business and how that can contribute to others.

Over the coming months, we would like to share with you our plans and ideas for our venture as we work through it and we would love you to give feedback to us.

Caspar & Nichola.