Racing Welfare won a silver at the Smiley Charity Film Awards on March 20th in recognition of its impactful 2023 Mental Health Awareness Week film.
The gala was held in Leicester Square, where many royal, global and European film premieres take place. From 15 finalists within their category, the expert panel of judges deemed Racing Welfare’s film worthy of the silver award. Taking gold, was breast cancer awareness charity, CoppaFeel.
The film, which was commissioned for Mental Health Awareness Week in 2023, depicts anxiety building up for a racehorse trainer. It shows typical day-to-day scenarios that can build up to create challenges to mental health.
The charity’s aim for the film is to raise awareness of the signs and symptoms of anxiety, normalise conversations, and signpost to support services. Racing Welfare also called for people working in the horse racing industry to take action for their own mental health or for the mental health of others in the racing community.
The film was well received across the week with over 87,000 views on social media and was broadcast on RacingTV’s Luck On Sunday.
Racing Welfare’s head of communications and marketing, Nicki Strong said:
“It was a huge honour for our film to be recognised by an expert panel comprising high-profile and influential people from the worlds of fundraising, business, entertainment and media. We are extremely proud of the film and the role it played in spearheading our mental health campaign, and that it resonated with both those within and outside of the racing community. We’d like to say a huge thank you to Equine Productions for expertly bringing our vision to life, our actor Charlie Smith for giving his time and to Warren Greatrex and his team for allowing us to film at Rhonehurst.”
Chloe Martin, head of community engagement at Racing Welfare was instrumental in the campaign delivery and creation of the film. She added:
“I’m immensely proud that our charity was recognised for producing some of the best work of the year, sitting right up there alongside the biggest names and most universally recognised causes in the charity sector.
So many of our team contributed to the concept behind the film, the overall campaign and even more so to the mental health support services that it was promoting, so I hope they are as proud as I am of the part they played in this achievement.”
The Charity Film Awards are one of the largest charity events of the year, and this year, over 500 entries were received in total.
Suzanne Ashton, Founder of Everything Horse (Est, 2012), has a BA Hons in Marketing Management and a Diploma in Equine Science. Suzanne has ridden and owned horses all her life and has twelve years of experience in marketing, writing, design, SEO, and website creation.