From boy bands to unstoppable movement guru, Francis Owusu is empowering kids

Francis, what is the Unstoppable 24 campaign?

It's a movement challenge through September that asks schools to have students move for 24 minutes per day, Monday to Friday, for one week. But young people are dealing with challenges on a daily basis, 24/7, from a wellbeing and resilience level, so the idea is we want to encourage young people to have access to tools that can help them become unstoppable, 24/7.

Many young people are stuck these days in a sort of a cycle of inactivity, social disconnection and declining mental health. What we’re doing with Unstoppable 24 is giving them some way to boost their mood, connection, focus and learning readiness in just 24 minutes. The studies show that getting kids to move just eight minutes a day can have a positive effect of reducing their rates of depression by 12 per cent. So, we’re doing three times that at 24 minutes. We feel it is easy enough and long enough and doable enough for anyone to do 24 minutes.

The federal government’s guidelines for daily physical activity encourage moderate exercise of up to two hours a week, and if you do our challenge, 24 minutes a day times five, it equals two hours, the minimum requirement.

As part of the campaign, kids are asked to raise $24, with those funds going directly into resilience programs at their school. We are really clear on the direct connection between what is raised and what goes back into the school, to keep that ecosystem going of school empowerment.

How did Michelle Bridges and Andrew Redmayne, the ex-Socceroo who’s been dubbed the ‘Grey Wriggle’, become involved?

We’re based in Canberra and wanted to get the message out on a national level, so we went to our ambassadors to put the word out, asking: who believes that young people’s mental health and physical wellbeing is key? Michelle put her hand up straight away and her record speaks for itself. She’s been a celebrity fitness trainer and a very big advocate of movement, mental health and wellbeing. Andrew is obviously into sports as well, with the Socceroos, but he’s also a qualified school teacher and very passionate about young people.

I was talking to Andrew the other day and he said that he has generations of educators in his family. You know, cousins, parents, siblings, private university lecturers.

He was the black sheep of the family, being an international soccer player?

Haha. Yes. He was telling me that during the Qatar World Cup, he got his teaching degree.

And he’s going to visit a school as part of the Unstoppable 24?

Yes. For schools that register before June 30th, they’ll go into a draw. One lucky school will get a visit from Andrew and he’ll do a soccer skills session, an inspirational talk and a Q&A for students.

You’ve noted the shocking statistic that 70 per cent of two- to 17-year-olds don’t meet the daily physical activity requirements.

Yeah, it’s pretty scary, and unfortunately, post-covid lockdowns, we’re seeing that number not coming down, but in fact it’s scary to say that it could increase. What now is happening is a lot of young people spend more time on screens than we used to, I remember, as a kid. We’d be on our bikes, and then we’d get out in the morning, we wouldn’t come back until night, we’d find a place to eat at someone’s house for lunchtime, and we’d move all day. Now what’s happening is a lot more young people are finding themselves behind a screen for a lot longer and isolating themselves. Connected online, but in physically social isolation, and moving less. So, it’s really important that we continue to hit this multiple ways, and Unstoppable 24 is our way to disrupt that statistic and just to try and break that cycle.

You’ve personally been at this mission for a long time. What was the origin of your charity Kulture Break, which is behind the campaign?

It’s birthed out of my story. As a young man, I really struggled with self-esteem. My parents were migrants – were actually diplomats from Ghana. They migrated to Australia and naturalised after the posting. At school as a young man, I really struggled to fit in and express myself. I often found myself being looked down upon not because of what I said, but because of what I looked like, and so I developed this sort of inferiority that maybe I wasn’t good enough and I was less than others. What changed for me is when I moved back from Geelong to Canberra, where I was born.

I got involved in what I now know – but back then didn’t know – was the rock eisteddfod. Now, I was at an all boys’ school, and it was known for sports – academics and sports. Dance wasn't something a boy would do publicly in that kind of school, but I got involved in a small group of boys that decided to dance. That year we came third in the ACT and that changed me. I remember being on stage and rather than people looking down at me, people looked up to me and applauded, and I could do something, I could contribute. Art became my expression of who I was.

How did that develop after rock eisteddfods?

We formed a boy band in the late nineties, early 2000s. It was originally called 925, because we considered ourselves hard workers. You know, the Dolly Parton song? Then we changed it to D’Verse, as in writing the verse of a song, but also because we came from different cultures. There was a Japanese guy, a Zimbabwean guy, an Irish guy and me. We performed for over a decade, on TV, morning shows, carols by candlelight, all that stuff.

The funny and interesting thing was halfway through all that, I began to see the power of the arts and impact on myself, and I said: I want this not just to be about me. I started going to schools and sharing through dance and movement, an opportunity for young people to express themselves. I had no idea when I started in the first school that it would transpire to 24 years and half a million young people impacted by the message, which is: “You don’t become somebody, you are somebody.”

What does that mean?

I was always trying to be someone, trying to fit in, and I just realised through movement that I am somebody and it’s not what I do, it’s actually who I am. At Kulture Break, we say that the world judges you and you tend to accept it, and then you have your identity. But we flip it by saying your identity is who you are, and you’re accepted, so now perform. We disconnect that idea of having to do something in order to be someone. We say you already are someone – now go and do something.

There seems to be a strong connection between movement and empowerment in your world, though.

It goes deeper than that. The University of Western Sydney did some research around cultural wellbeing for us, and produced a study, Dance for Life. It discovered what we call the four C’s of resilience through movement. The first is connection; when you move with other people, you connect. We’ve seen that through the history of human cultures. The second is confidence, which you build as you move. By learning movement, steps, dancing, you build your confidence in what you can do. The third is continuous learning. If you’ve never danced before, you’ll make mistakes, but when you mess it up, you learn, you grow and you improve. And the fourth C is contribution. When you get onto the stage or get in front of people and you share your gift, you’re making a contribution, and people get inspired by watching you and also may want to be inspired enough to join you, and we call that giving back.

Not only are the four C’s positive things, but they fundamentally build our baseline of resilience, and they can translate to other areas of our lives. That's what it did for me, and what we are looking to build are Kulture Breakers – raise a generation of Kulture Breakers to go back into communities and bring change because of the empowerment they got themselves.

After 24 years, that must be happening at scale.

I’m old enough now, I’ve been around long enough now, that I have the cycle of kids that I taught now bringing their kids. They say, yeah, it did this for me, so they’ll bring their young children to our programs and share their sort of generational change that we see.

I was in an Apple store once, in my tracksuit pants, looking to have my phone fixed, and the guy behind the counter, when I gave my Kulture Break email, said: “Kulture Break? You don’t know me, but when I was in high school, I was suicidal because my parents broke up, and your program came to my high school. Through what you guys said, sharing that you don’t become somebody, you are somebody, and giving a space to move, completely changed my life. Since then, I have not had a suicidal thought.”

That was very humbling: a guy I’d never met before, sharing the impact that the program had had on him.

One final question: Will D’verse ever re-form? Would it still be a boy band, or would it be an old man band?

Hahaha. Yeah, a grandpa band. There is talk, to celebrate Kulture Break’s 25th anniversary. We might do a reunion next year.

More information

Find out more about Kulture Break here.

Find out more about the Unstoppable24 schools movement challenge here.