Olivia Comberti, founder Bethnal Green Ventures
I wanted to create an empowering, less isolating way for young people to see their ambitions and do what they wanted to do with their lives rather than what was advised as what would be the most sensible thing to do with their lives, and to really take it back to.
Realization of death can be a really useful wake up call… What if we could use that as a starting point? What if we could take people from the point of thinking about what they want to do with their life to writing it on a wall and then supporting them to actually create that ridiculous, wild,ambitious goal. That was the starting point for the Before I Die Network.
People connect less face to face than they used to. …People are craving real connections with real people and it’s something we don’t have enough in the world.
My Before I Die goal is to design something that will change peoples’ lives for the better on a massive scale, in the regions of community or mental health, bringing people together and empowering them to be with each other and have conversations. One of my passions is to drop the façade, this façade of formality. It’s when you look around and think, “F*ck, everyone else gets this. Everyone understands what’s going on, I must be the only person who’s lost and doesn’t get it” and we don’t fit in because we all have that mask up. It’s something we’ve all struggled with, we all have that mask up. And that’s what I want to take down.
Olivia Comberti, founder Bethnal Green Ventures