Why I Started the Foundation

This is a personal story. It involves loss, a health scare that stopped me in my tracks and a decision to turn painful experience into something that might help others. I hope it resonates.

In 2009, I suffered a brain spasm — a suspected bleed on the brain. The cause was stress.

That sentence still takes me a moment to sit with. Because I was, at the time, doing everything society tells you a successful person should be doing. I was building a business. I was delivering for clients. I was pushing forward, always forward. And my body eventually said: enough.

It is a profound thing, to be stopped like that. And whilst I recovered — and I am grateful every day that I did — it changed something in me permanently. It made me look at the cost of the way we work. The cost of the culture we have built around ambition and achievement. And it made me ask a question I couldn’t shake:

Who is actually talking about this? Who is helping people before they reach breaking point?

It wasn’t just me

I want to say something that I don’t always find easy to say publicly, but which is important to this story.

Some of my closest family members have passed away or suffered with severe mental health issues. Those experiences — watching people you love struggle, and in some cases not make it through — leave a mark on you that never fully fades. They give you a particular kind of understanding. Not a clinical one. A human one.

And they give you, if you let them, a purpose.

I wanted to support mental health and wellbeing — but I also wanted to know that any money raised was going directly to make a real difference. Not getting lost. Not disappearing into administration. Actually reaching people and organisations doing vital work on the ground.

The answer was to set up the Foundation.

What the Foundation stands for

The Graham Shapiro Foundation was established in 2019 with two clear purposes: to support mental health and wellbeing, and to inspire and nurture young entrepreneurialism across the UK.

Those two things are not separate in my mind. They never have been. The mental health of our next generation of entrepreneurs — the pressure they face, the impossible standards they hold themselves to, the isolation that can come with building something from nothing — is one of the most important issues of our time. And it is not talked about nearly enough.

Through our university partnership with University of Westminster — where we proudly funded the University’s first ever Self-Leadership Programme — we work directly with students who are brimming with potential and who deserve to hear that their wellbeing matters as much as their grades.

And we work alongside some of the UK’s finest mental health charities — MIND, YoungMinds, Help for Heroes, CALM, the Mental Health Foundation and the Alzheimer’s Society. It is a genuine honour to stand alongside them.

The people who make it possible

I don’t say this enough, but I want to say it clearly here: the Foundation is not me. It is a team.

Our trustees — Professor John M. Mohin OBE D.Univ DL, Jade Shapiro, Mark Hamill and Richard Hammett — are four people who give their time, expertise, and genuine passion to this cause. They have shown relentless dedication and I am deeply grateful to every one of them.

The recognition we have received — being named Mental Health and Wellbeing Charity of the Year, receiving the Bronze Stevie Award for Non-Profit Thought Leader of the Year, and most recently being honoured as Young Persons’ Mental Health and Wellbeing Charity of the Year at the Non-Profit Organisation Awards 2025 — belongs to all of them. I accept every award on behalf of the whole team, with enormous pride and humility.

We are only just getting started

There is so much more ahead — more partnerships, a potential schools programme to reach even younger audiences and a growing voice in the national conversation around mental health and entrepreneurship.

If any of this resonates with you — if you’ve experienced something similar, or you believe in what we’re building — please do get in touch info@grahamshapirofoundation.org Every person who joins this conversation makes it more powerful.

And to everyone who has already supported us — thank you. From the bottom of my heart.

www.grahamshapirofoundation.org

 

THE GRAHAM SHAPIRO FOUNDATION  |  PROFESSOR GRAHAM SHAPIRO

 

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