Markle urges women to feel empowered
Fresh from meeting Meghan Markle, Bryony Gordon reveals what’s next for the young royals’ Heads Together campaign
MEGHAN MARKLE has signalled her support for the Me Too and Time’s Up movements, suggesting the younger generation of the Royal family could use their influence to “shine a light” on women’s empowerment.
Ms Markle, who appeared on stage with her fiancé and future brother and sister-in-law to discuss their charity work, said there was “no better time” to raise the profile of women’s voices, as she referenced the high profile movements against sexual harassment.
The former actress, who will marry Prince Harry on May 19, said she could not wait to “hit the ground running” in her official duties. The couple undertook their first official speaking engagement with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge yesterday, at a forum to discuss their Royal Foundation.
Asked about her campaigning work, Ms Markle said: “I think right now in the climate we are seeing so many campaigns, I mean Me Too and Time’s Up, there is no better time than to really continue to shine a light on women feeling empowered and people really helping to support them, men included in that.”
The Duchess had faced pressure to wear black to the Baftas in support of Time’s Up, but chose to tread a tactful line in dark green with a black ribbon.
The invitation arrived a couple of weeks ago, in the form of a phone call that I had answered while attempting to wrestle my four-year-old daughter into a pair of roller skates at Center Parcs. It was a nice man at Kensington Palace, wondering if I would chair a panel on the work of Heads Together at the first Royal Foundation Forum, in front of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
I clicked the clips on my daughter’s
Frozen skates and let out a little gasp. As someone who spent over three decades silently battling mental illness in various forms – OCD, depression, bulimia, addiction – I still haven’t got used to these calls, to the absolute sea change that has occurred in the last year or so since Heads Together launched. It is still astonishing to me that, as a nation, we now encourage people to talk about something that, for so long, was more often than not hidden in silent shame. And I still can’t quite believe that I had a small part in it, by interviewing Prince Harry about his own mental health for the
Telegraph’s Mad World podcast. Yesterday, as I rather nervously took to the stage to present the panel (irony alert: most people on mental health panels suffer terribly from anxiety), I figured it was probably time to thank the principals, as they are referred to. They were sitting there right in front of me; it wasn’t as if they could escape. And how often does an obsessive compulsive recovering alcoholic and addict get a chance to talk at the royals? Well, weirdly, quite a lot in the past year. Which is why I wanted to thank them: for breaking with tradition, and using their voices to give millions of people the strength to use theirs.
While all eyes were on Prince Harry’s wife-to-be, Meghan Markle, appearing for the first time at a Royal Foundation event with the other principals, the forum was also a chance to showcase the work done by remarkable people like Chantelle Stefanovic, who grew up in poverty
‘How often does a recovering addict get to address the royals? Quite a lot, this year’
in Nottingham surrounded by violence, and who is now a mentor to young children experiencing similar situations. Or Karl Hinnett, who was just 18 when he was turned into a human fireball in Iraq, and has since run 154 marathons to raise funds for injured servicemen and show the healing power of exercise.
Rhian Burke was also present to tell her story: six years ago her one-year-old son died suddenly; five days later, driven mad with grief, her husband killed himself. Soon after, she set up a charity to help provide bereavement services; last year she ran the marathon for Heads Together, and yesterday Prince William singled her out as one of his biggest inspirations. “Seriously,” he told her, “when I am having a bad day, I think of you and what you have done. You are amazing.”
It was clear that neither Prince Harry nor the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge could quite believe how successful Heads Together had been – an idea that Prince Harry joked had originally been planned “on the back of a fag packet”. Cue much laughter. “It really was.”
It was the Duchess who had first suggested a mental health campaign,
noticing that it was the issue that linked most of their charity work, from homelessness to addiction to knife crime. The Royal Foundation began putting ideas together in the summer of 2015, and in May 2016 Heads Together was launched as an umbrella campaign supporting the work of eight different mental health charities: Mind, Contact, Best Beginnings, Calm, the Anna Freud Centre, The Mix, Young Minds and Place2be. Eleven months later, every person running the Virgin London Marathon set off wearing a blue Heads Together headband. I was lucky enough to be one of them, and will be taking part for the charity this year, too (proving that I am truly bonkers).
Yesterday’s forum was a chance to reflect on the work of Heads Together – and let people know that the organisation has only really just got going. Today, the Duke of Cambridge will launch plans for a Mental Health at Work website that has been created in conjunction with Mind, to enable employers to access a range of resources that will help promote healthy work environments; online training will also be made available for small and medium-sized businesses so that employees can support each other. A grant has also been given to the Mental Health Innovation Network, which is in the process of creating an online service that will enable people with mental health issues to access help 24/7.
Paul Farmer, the chief executive of Mind, told me that, thanks to the work of Heads Together, “there has been a true opening-up of the conversation about mental health. There has been a significant shift in public consciousness. The campaign helped many more people to step forward, and that causes long-lasting change because it sends a message about the need to prioritise mental health services. Now we turn awareness into action. There is a long way to go, but there is no turning back now.”
This was a sentiment echoed by Prince Harry, who asserted that there was “still a lot to do”. The Duchess of Cambridge, heavily pregnant but raring to go, was keen to make the point that the work of Heads Together is by no means finished – she has heaps of ideas about family mental health, and said she hoped that the next generation of the Royal family would have their own Heads Together-style campaign. Meghan Markle told the audience that she was in the process of working out which charities she was going to work with – as her husband-to-be joked once more, there was the small matter of a wedding to plan as well.
But everyone at the forum agreed that the American actress was seriously impressive yesterday. “Absolutely whip-smart,” was the verdict of one charity chief. There was a palpable sense of excitement in the room about what she will bring to an already flourishing Royal Foundation.
“You’ll often hear people say: ‘You’re helping women find their voices’,” she said, in her first public Q&A. “I fundamentally disagree with that, because women don’t need help finding a voice: they have a voice. They need to feel empowered to use it, and people need to be encouraged to listen.”
Yesterday, we took another step closer to that goal thanks to the young royals and their willingness to flout convention. Truly, what a remarkable time to be alive.