by Lewis Hine
I had expected people to be shy – that’s normal. It can be tough, introducing yourself to a stranger. But I’d given everyone a pencil case containing a piece of paper and a pen so that they could exchange phone numbers and email addresses with the people they met… and no one was using them.
It didn’t take me long to figure out why. All these kids had a disability of some kind, and had missed a lot of school. I knew all about that, and what it does to you – you end up with poor social skills, zero confidence and you probably can’t read and write very well, either. The result of this little mix? Isolation. No wonder no one was swapping contact details. It suddenly dawned on me that these kids were struggling with exactly the same issues as me, and that our shared problems gave me a unique perspective: I understood exactly how they felt. Watching everyone at that party made me realise that they were so like me that I really could do something to help them.
A couple of years earlier, I’d gone to a trade show called Event Tech Live with Mum. She’d volunteered to help a friend out, but I was going through a rough patch; she didn’t want to let her friend down, though, so she decided to take me with her. (She dressed me up in a jacket and tie and pretended that I was on work experience. I’m not sure we convinced anyone – it was obvious that I was feeling pretty bad.) It was really dull standing about on her stand all the time, and at one point I wandered over to the booth opposite that was demonstrating this cool gadget called a Poken. It’s a hand-shaped USB stick that uses near-field communication to allow people to swap information simply by touching two together. When you plug it into your computer, it brings up a photograph of everyone you connected with and if you click on the photo, you get that person’s contact details.
I was given a free sample to take home, but as I didn’t know anyone else with one, I just stuck it in my drawer and forgot all about it… until those unused pens and paper at the Halloween Friend Finder party got me thinking. That was it! I could make it much easier for people to exchange contact details! I wrote to the company who made Pokens, but they didn’t reply. I couldn’t think of a better product for Friend Finder so I wrote again, this time sending it straight to the CEO. Looking back, I’m quite surprised that I had the guts to do that, but I think I was so determined to make Friend Finder work that I didn’t stop to wonder whether a 15 year old should be writing to the head of a company asking for favours. I explained that I was launching a project to help isolated children make friends, and that I thought Pokens would be a really valuable tool. My cheek paid off: a few weeks later 250 of them arrived at my door.
I knew they would be a real game-changer. Giving members of the Friend Finder family Pokens not only meant they wouldn’t have to admit they had problems reading and writing, and all that embarrassing stuff; these cool little gadgets would also give them a reason to go and speak to each other in the first place. There’s nothing like a new piece of tech to get people talking!
I couldn’t wait to try them out. It was December, so I thought we’d have a Friend Finder Christmas party. I got chatting to a man called John at a car boot sale; when I told him about Friend Finder, he offered to let us have the party in the community club he ran. It had a bar, a juke box and a snooker table so it was the perfect place for a teen gathering. Mum bought a Christmas tree, but John and his staff gave us everything else for free, including the pizza and chips. Charity projects depend almost entirely on goodwill, and there were a lot of people like John in my community. For example, one of our neighbours messaged me on Facebook to say he had a signed Pompey football shirt (Pompey is what everyone calls Portsmouth Football Club) and would I like to offer it as a raffle prize to raise some money? Local businesses supported us too – the Car Finance Company made a donation and all the staff volunteered to help out at our events. I couldn’t have got Friend Finder off the ground without that kind of help. People can be amazingly generous.
About 30 teenagers turned up to the Christmas party and we gave each of them a Poken. They went down really well. Mum’s got this video of the evening and you can see everyone touching their Pokens together, exchanging details. Afterwards, one of the parents said that she’d found them really helpful too because, rather than waiting for her son to tell her who he’d met at a party (which he never did), she could see their names on the Poken and that meant she could help make sure they kept in touch.
Seeing Friend Finder working made me feel so much better, physically and mentally. School still wasn’t the best, but at least the bullying had eased off. When the boy who’d started the Facebook group received his community resolution, it had shocked everyone. Even at my school, the kids were quite frightened of the police.
But before I could do any more I had to go back into hospital to have my programmable shunt changed. To be honest, I don’t like to think about what the surgeons actually do when they operate, but Mum says that for this one, they had to open up my head and my stomach and join the catheter in my stomach to the connection point in my head. I was pretty sore afterwards and although I was only in hospital for three days, I was dizzy for about a week. You tend to feel a bit concussed when you’ve had people fiddling about in your brain.
Once I was back on my feet, I started to put my plan into action. The first thing I had to do was find some money. I’d spent the initial £300 grant from O2 on the Halloween party, and although Mum had paid for decorations at the Christmas party, she certainly couldn’t afford to fund anything else. I knew O2 also supported longer-term projects to help young people grow and scale up their ideas, so I went back to the team at GoThinkBig and applied for the year-long grant of £2,500. My proposal was to put on one Friend Finder event every month for 12 months.
The great thing about GoThinkBig is that they don’t just give you the money. If they like the sound of your proposal, they invite you to attend a series of workshops in London. Each one focuses on a different aspect of setting up and running a project, from budgeting to marketing. We almost missed the first one because we didn’t realise how far the venue was from the tube station. We started walking, but I was in so much pain I had to sit down. Mum called the team at O2 and said, ‘I don’t know quite where we are but we can’t get to you.’ Five minutes later this man appeared with a wheelchair. I’ve no idea where he found it, but it made my day.
The sessions themselves were pretty daunting because everyone was older than me and none of them had a disability. I had to take Mum along to help me remember what I needed to say – and I don’t think they’d ever let a mum in the room before. The worst bit was when we all had to stand up and give a five-minute talk about our idea. I’d never spoken in public before and here I was having to stand up in front of 80 strangers. It was terrifying. I didn’t have anything prepared, so I just told my story and explained that I wanted to launch Friend Finder to help other kids like me. This woman at the back of the room was in tears by the time I’d finished. I was worried I’d said something to upset her, but Mum said she was just moved by my story.
The training process may have been hard, but it was also incredibly useful and by the time the money came through on 2nd June 2016, I had some idea, at least, of how to make my Friend Finder dream a reality.
Top of the ‘to do’ list was to find a venue for the monthly parties. I’d had the Halloween party at Havant Leisure Centre so I decided to try there first. They were really supportive, so I booked one of the sports halls from 4pm to 6pm on the first Thursday of every month for the next year. Having an official Friend Finder slot for our social events made it all feel very real.
Marketing was next on the list. The publicity campaign began with designing a website. I say ‘design’, but what I mean is that me and a couple of family friends called Max and Jack used one of those website-building tools and just stuck pictures and text all over a luminous yellow background. It was tragic. The text wasn’t even inside the boxes on the mobile version. The site may have been rubbish, but at least friendfinderofficial.com was live. (I’m pleased to
say that Mum has redone it since, and by the time you read this there will hopefully be a proper one designed by someone who really knows what they’re doing.)
There’s a story behind the web address too. When we first typed ‘Friend Finder’ into Google, a load of porn sites popped up, which really isn’t what you want for a site aimed at disabled children. Mum wrote to one of them asking whether they would put up a black ‘adult content’ front cover, and she even offered to buy one of the other sites, but none of them got back to us. So we decided to add the word ‘official’ to our name; it’s not ideal but at least it seems to have solved the problem.
I also made friends with The News, Portsmouth’s local paper. They had covered some of my fundraising events in the past and were really supportive from the start. They would write short pieces about what Friend Finder was doing each week and print the website and email addresses. That publicity was incredibly important. Friend Finder only succeeded because the local community got behind me and, at least in the early days, the local community only found out about what I was doing because of The News. I owe them a lot.
The first of the regular monthly Friend Finder events took place on Thursday 7th July 2016. It had a sports theme and I hired a bouncy castle. That was a real winner – even the older kids were jumping around on it, including me. You’ll often find a bouncy castle at children’s parties and school fetes, so most kids have grown out of them by the time they reach their teens; but the people who came to this Friend Finder event had missed a lot of parties while they were growing up. A bouncy castle was still something to get excited about.
Putting on an event for disabled children isn’t like hosting a normal kids’ party because there are so many safeguarding issues. Mum has had a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check, which proves she doesn’t have a criminal record, and Matt from the leisure centre volunteered to be our first-aider, but it was a steep learning curve. I managed to get hit with a basketball at that party – someone threw it down the room and it bashed me square on the side of the head. I don’t think my ears are any more delicate than anyone else’s, but it hit me so hard that it burst my eardrum. I couldn’t hear properly for weeks. It’s quite funny really; I’ve never been allowed to do sports and then I start organising sports events for Friend Finder. We were so focused on keeping everyone else safe that we let our own guard down.
I’m happy to say that no one other than me has been hurt at a Friend Finder event, but I do seem to be a bit accident-prone. We went to the Hemel Hempstead Snow Centre once; taking 22 disabled kids skiing takes some planning, I can tell you, but with the help of Snowbility, we did it. There were autistic kids, a boy with one leg, someone with a catheter and another with a terminal brain tumour – and things didn’t go so well for me. It took half an hour to get me into the sit-ski and, although I set off facing forwards like a normal person, I somehow managed to spin round 180 degrees and finish my descent backwards. I’ve never seen so many people run away from me. It was terrifying.
To be fair, not everything we do with Friend Finder is physically dangerous. Some of the events are just socials – a chance for kids to hang out together in a place where everyone feels safe and comfortable enough to be themselves. It sounds like such a simple thing, but when you’ve spent a lot of your childhood in hospital, or your entire school career feeling different, it’s the normal things, the stuff that everyone else takes for granted, that you miss out on.
There are quite a lot of older teenagers in the Friend Finder family and I wanted to put something on for them that would give them a taste of what it’s like to go out with their mates for the night. I hired a bar with a snooker table and a darts board and we all just hung out. There wasn’t any alcohol, of course, but for most of the people there – me included – the experience of ordering even a lemonade from a real bar was enough of a treat.
Friend Finder has grown massively since those early days, but it changed me as a person right from the start. I’d reached a point where I couldn’t go on without having a friend – after all, it’s one of the most basic things in life. Everyone needs someone to talk to, to have a laugh with and create memories with. By launching this project, I made myself a whole new family of friends. To be honest, I find setting up the events quite stressful because organisation is not one of my strong points, but seeing people arrive with hardly anyone to talk to and then leave two hours later with multiple new friends and contacts makes it all worthwhile. Seeing so many people looking happy and just being themselves around other people makes me feel really pleased with what Friend Finder has achieved.
There are currently over a million kids in the UK suffering from a long-term disability or illness that keeps them away from school. Lots of healthy kids might think it sounds great to skip school, but take it from me, the reality over long periods of time is that you get lonely. School might be a bit boring sometimes, but it’s also full of kids – it’s the place where young people learn how to communicate and play with others. It’s where we learn how to make friends. I set Friend Finder up to help people who were missing out, like me. And by doing that, I helped myself out of my depression. I feel incredibly lucky.
My Top Tips for Life
If you’re being bullied like me and my sister Chloe were, tell an adult. It doesn’t matter who – it could be a teacher, a parent, an aunt, uncle or a youth worker in a club. Just make sure you tell someone. You may think you’re saving them from a problem by not telling them, but you’re not.
If you’re a parent worried about your child because they’re acting differently, talk to them so they have a chance to tell you what’s up.
If you know your friend is being bullied, don’t just stand there and watch. Tell an adult. OK, it’s scary, but you must be brave and let people know what’s going on. They will help you.
If you can’t find an adult to tell then call Childline on 0800 1111. They’re trained to help you deal with what you’re going through, and they’re amazing.
More disabled people get bullied than any other demographic. There are no excuses for bullying, of course, but one of the reasons it happens is that people don’t understand disability. We need to share our stories and be proud of who we are. The more we do that, the less ammunition they will have to use against us.
Remember, the bully is probably going through something challenging, too. Often, later in life, they really regret their actions and what they did plays on their minds. Even if you are an adult who feels this way, send the person you bullied a message saying sorry, because it’s never too late to apologise. And it may help you to finally put the bad feelings behind you.
I used Friend Finder to help me when I was being bullied. I found out about O2 GoThinkBig and contacted them to get involved. If you’re being bullied, or are feeling down, look out for groups you can join in your local community; it will help you feel better. There are lots of big companies who support community projects so, if you have an idea, don’t be afraid to contact them and ask for their help. No matter what age you are, this is a great way to forget the bad and focus on the good. Trust me, I’ve done it and it works.
HELLO, WEMBLEY!
MY PHONE RANG one day at the end of August 2016. I didn’t recognise the number.
‘Hello,’ I said, half-expecting it to be one of those spam calls where someone tells you you’ve been in an accident that wasn’t your fault.
‘Is that Lewis Hine?’ the voice asked. ‘This is Radio 1.’
I thought it must be some sort of joke, but I said, ‘Yeah, this is Lewis.’
‘I’m calling to tell you that you’ve made it into the final 30 for the 2016 Teen Awards,’ the voice said. ‘You were nominated by your mum and we need to make sure you’re happy to go ahead. It’s a huge deal if you win. You have to go on stage at Wembley Arena in front of 10,000 people, live on Radio 1, for a start. And there will be media attention too.’
Well, I was shocked. Mum’s always been my biggest fan, but she hadn’
t told me she’d put me forward. I’m not sure I really took in much of what they said to me after that, but I did know that this kind of opportunity wasn’t going to come my way again.
‘Yeah,’ I said, still unable to believe what I was hearing. ‘That’s fine.’
Mum had come into the room by then.
‘Who was that, Lew?’ she asked, when I hung up.
‘Radio 1,’ I replied. ‘They wanted to know if I was happy about being nominated for a Teen Hero Award because I’ve made it to the final 30.’
‘And are you?’ she asked quite seriously, as if it had nothing to do with her.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s cool. Thanks.’
‘Oh Lew,’ she said, and came over to hug me.
I was glad Mum hadn’t asked me beforehand, because there’s no way I would have let her send off the form. It seems a bit big-headed, doesn’t it? You know, like, ‘I’ve done something so heroic that I (rather than one of the thousands of young people doing brave and good things in the UK) deserve an award.’ But now that she had, I was really excited. We all were.
We were told that the winner would be announced on 19th September, but the day came and went and nothing happened. The next day we were in Asda choosing cereal when Mum’s phone rang. She answered, then went all quiet, and passed it to me.
‘It’s for you,’ she said. She had this funny expression on her face like she was trying not to smile.
‘Hello,’ I said.
It was a man I didn’t recognise. He said, ‘Hi Lewis, this is Nick Grimshaw. From Radio 1.’ As if he needed to add that. I listen to his show all the time. ‘Congratulations, you’ve won. You’re a Radio 1 Teen Hero.’
I was so surprised, I literally couldn’t say anything. I just dropped the box of Shreddies I’d been holding and passed the phone back to Mum.