Supporter Spotlight: Nikki Croft-Girvan, Ghostwriter & Trustee
Supporters come in all forms, from fundraisers generating donations to those that help spread the word about Chasing the Stigma’s work.
Storytelling is a vital way to explain what we do and why we do it, and it is also what Chasing the Stigma Trustee, Nikki Croft-Girvan has done throughout her career. Now, she uses her skills to support us, most recently by sharing our CEO and Founder, Jake Mills’ story in her latest writing project – What a Wonderful World: Good News Stories to Calm Your Mind for a Peaceful Night’s Sleep.
Nikki has been a supporter of the charity since 2016 and a trustee since 2018. Starting out as a journalist specialising in true life features and with a sideline in ghostwriting, Nikki then moved into a career in PR working for a number of national agencies, before setting up her own company, Auteur Media. This allows Nikki to focus on working with PR clients aligned with her values, as well as take on more ghostwriting projects.
Written as the world slowly began to emerge from a global pandemic in 2021, What a Wonderful World is a hardback anthology of 100 short, positive news stories designed to be an antidote to ‘doom-scrolling’ and the impact on our mental health of having a constant window onto tragedy, devastation and bad news in the palm of our hands.
Nikki said: “What a Wonderful World came along at exactly the right time for me. Like so many others, 2020 had been a year filled with anxiety and worry and I know that I’d developed an unhealthy habit of scrolling through social media late into the night, reading about heartbreaking stories, tragedies and inequalities.
“The project meant I had to research and find good news stories from all around the world, positive things that were having a real impact, people who were acting as a force for good and stepping up even when others weren’t. I discovered thousands of stories and it was such a joyful project to work on – it was actually very difficult to narrow it down to 100.
“As I was researching, I also saw a huge opportunity to share the story of a force for good that I knew really well – Jake and the Chasing the Stigma team. Jake’s story was perfect for the book – an ordinary person who has taken his own lived experience of mental health and transformed it into something that is helping other people everyday with The Hub of Hope app.
“Having seen the passion and work that the team that I work with, has put into making the Hub of Hope the resource it is today, it was an enormous pleasure to be able to include it in the book and give it a national and even international profile!”
You can find Jake and the charity’s story on page 47 of What a Wonderful World published by HarperCollins, available online and in bookshops, find a stockist here.