Emily Turnbull is on a mission to get Kiwis to “chatter about what matters”.
Turnbull is the founder of the Chatterbox seat, which she's designed as a simple tool to get us talking. She wants to see one in every town in Aotearoa.
The project was borne of “absolute love and passion”, she tells Nights.
Photo: Chatterbox.org.co.nz
“My gorgeous, wonderful husband, Darryl Paton died in 2019 by suicide and at the time that he passed away there was only a really small number of people who knew he had bipolar.
“He at that point was feeling an incredibly deep kind of self-stigma, believing that if folk knew that he had bipolar, he would be treated differently and judged. So this was a dude who was the absolute life of the party, loads of friends, smart, you know, well-rounded, an awesome guy who just had this very deep self-stigma.”
Turnbull and her late husband had a “raft of conversations” over the years about how difficult it was for him to open up about his mental health struggles, she says.
“And if we can make it easier for people just to chat about the bad things and to connect a bit more. And that surely can’t be a bad thing. And that's where Chatterbox came from.”
Chat is connection, she says, one of the things that keeps us thriving.
“That is exactly what the seat is designed to do. To encourage people to chatter about the things that matter.”
It's not a seat in a traditional park bench sense, she says.
“It's designed to replicate this idea of lounging on a picnic blanket. So, the concept that we can lie down and have really casual conversations or sit up or break bread together or yarn.”
When she hears stories of the seat being used, or sees it being used on her walks in Auckland’s Point Chevalier, it “does something to her heart,” she says.
“And Daryl has a legacy creating something which actually could make a real difference. A real difference here in Aotearoa and to me that is just so healing.”
Now she wants to see Chatterbox seats countrywide.
“Here is just a piece of street furniture ready to go, which creates a really lovely opportunity for people to connect and chat and my God one chat could actually change someone's life.”
