Fellow's Profile
Dan Flanagan
Fellow's Profile
Dan Flanagan
Maybe, I'm Just Like My Father
Fellowship
- Themes
- Focus
-
Building fatherhood movements that men choose, with a user manual that any community can run
- Countries
- Fellowship year
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2026
- Locality
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South East
Biography
I am the Founder of Dad La Soul, a UK fatherhood movement built from one kitchen-table question. What if dads are not broken, just brilliantly bad at admitting they are lonely? In 2017, I was one of those dads. I looked fine from the outside. Inside, I was lonely and ashamed. I wrote a blog asking if anyone else felt invisible. The replies did not stop.
That question became Dad La Soul. We now connect more than 12,000 fathers through 500 events. We use play, music, comedy and honest conversation. Not as gimmicks, but as ways into isolation, loneliness and suicide prevention. We do not ask men to walk into support. We build spaces they actually want to enter.
My Fellowship will take me to the USA. I will learn from fatherhood movements using culture, peer support, policy and technology. I want to understand how they reach men that mainstream services miss. I also want to learn how local belonging becomes national change. I will bring that learning home to build a UK fatherhood movement with a manual. Something communities can run, adapt and own. Because friendship can be a public health intervention. And fatherhood should never begin with silence.
Disclaimer
All Reports are copyright © the author. The moral right of the author has been asserted. The views and opinions expressed by any Fellow are those of the Fellow and not of the Churchill Fellowship or its partners, which have no responsibility or liability for any part of them.
Disclaimer
All Reports are copyright © the author. The moral right of the author has been asserted. The views and opinions expressed by any Fellow are those of the Fellow and not of the Churchill Fellowship or its partners, which have no responsibility or liability for any part of them.
