YOU get the sense that nothing in Poppy Jaman’s world ever slows down – trying to fight the good fight when it comes to mental health is always perpetually busy. So it proved…yet. “You know, 2023, I feel like was a year of bedding down,” the founder and vice-chair of the MindForward Alliance UK told the GG2 Power List. “We came out of the pandemic, and then I think there was a bit of a high like, ‘Oh, my God, life exists again, we can connect with people’. And we also took stock of the fact that overnight during the pandemic my organisation went global.

We were working with UK businesses, and then suddenly, we were working in a much deeper way with global organisations, and 2023 was taking stock, where is our energy going to go, because in the mental health world, or certainly for my organisation, we really spread ourselves out, and we had to just go, ‘Okay, we can’t continue to do all of those things’.

MindForward Alliance [MFA] describes itself as a global chapter developed by Mental Health Alliance, a not-for-profit membership organisation which Jaman founded in 2017. MFA has branches in the UK, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Australia, with a mission to unite businesses globally to set the standards for workplace mental health. The cost-of-living cri sis and the aftereffects of the pandemic have made things worse when it comes to mental health, she said. “The data around the world shows that after a global crisis, or after a catastrophic incident, for a year, two years, after wards, you see the impact on people and leaders. We started to see quite a lot of that, and 2023 was definitely that. In the UK, pre-pandemic, the mental health crisis was there, particularly for the younger