Launceston architect creates COVID-19 outreach group

"I do a lot of driving for my job and I kind of always suspected at some point I'd probably come across something but never to the extreme I did," he says.

"It was a fairly, awful horrific thing to see and it happened in a really remote part of the state."

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Because of the location, emergency crews arrived about an hour after Adam came across the accident and he was left to absorb the shock and horror that was in front of him.

"It's really hard to describe but it's almost like it was a brain melting process for me. There was me before the accident and me after and that one incident basically kind of took me down to a bare bone shell.

"It still haunts me, most night its pretty hard to sleep with it. It's just something that my brain just can't necessarily process that great."

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Before the accident, Adam said he assumed his mental health was "in check"

"For someone who thought their stuff was pretty well buttoned up and together...I started to become unstuck in quite dramatic ways.

"In exploring that process and trying to find some help for myself I bounced off lots of different services...social workers and psychologists."

Something else helped Adam too and it inspired him to help others.

"The one thing that did help me unravel the experience and put things back together was actually a Men's Group.

"There's something quite powerful about getting vulnerable with other men and other men that allow you to get vulnerable as well. That really helped."

With his new appreciation for peer to peer support, Adam sought to use the power of social media to help more people in need.

"I've made mental health and mental health platforms a bit of an agenda of mine, to set-up and help scaffold both men and women not just in Tasmania, but across Australia.

"In the middle of last year I established a couple of different platforms, EverHim and EverHer, as a mechanism to allow men and women to come into an environment which is a platform of trust and love and no judgement.

"The common thread is vulnerability and communication and coming together and allowing people just to honour how they're feeling."

Adam said the response to EverHim and EverHer led him to believe there was a need for platforms to connect people who were in need.

"The biggest takeaway from both those platforms is that there's a general desire and need as humans to want to connect, particularly in times of hardship," he says.

"People are craving and desiring human connection and desiring the need to want to help each other I think."

With this in mind, Tassie Kind was launched about a month ago. It's a coronavirus outreach group on Facebook that Adam created in response to the current pandemic.

"I thought it would be really great for Tasmania to start having some positivity, a platform they could go to that was coronavirus orientated but built out of kindness," he says.

"The mental health aspect of what we're seeing at the moment is probably going to be one of the hugest spin-offs of social distancing and quarantining."

Grassroots community movements like Tassie Kind could complement government funded services and initiatives designed to support peoples mental health, Adam said.

"Yes the financial aids that are being given to a range of organisations is fabulous and I totally respect and recommend people reach out in any way they can. But a bit like me, it takes a few times to actually find something that works.

"Enabling people to see through Tassie Kind, that they've got the courage to share how they're feeling might mean they've then got enough courage to go somewhere else with it as well."

With more than 3,000 followers and an outpouring of goodwill and kindness being extended among community members, Tassie Kind has taken off.

"It's been purely organic growth at the moment but it's just happened very quickly, I wasn't expecting it to go like it has," Adam says.

"It's actually been a really humbling process to witness, but also to have founded.

"What's been really amazing is seeing strangers comment and having these offline chat sessions which is phenomenal."

How Tassie Kind is working now isn't how Adam originally envisaged it.

"It was set up to primarily undo some of the negativity in social media that was flooding our eyes with when we were seeing this pretty awful social grossness happening in supermarkets," he explains.

"We're finding that although I started this platform as a conduit for people to reach out and ask for things if they needed it, and offer up things if they've got too much of it, it's fastly pivoting to be more of a social and emotional connection type platform.

"The platform is allowing people to emotionally kind of check in with one another about how they're feeling."

Adam is confident Tassie Kind can continue beyond COVID-19.

"Fortunately so far it's only attracting goodness and I've been pretty strict in saying that there's no room for judgement or negativity. If you're looking for that there's plenty of other platforms.

"If we're allowing and encouraging our members to be vulnerable we need to support that.

"I think it'll have a place post-coronavirus and it'll be more of a constant social and emotional type outreach for Tassie."