FunAndMoving.com have had a very successful and exciting time since EVOLVE
In the US through the magic of Cable TV we are now in over 32 million homes and have some exciting partnering deals in the pipeline for the near future.
Here in the UK, Pat had an inspirational time when she was invited to the Live Longer Better events hosted by Be Active Bedfordshire and Active Surrey. It was a great opportunity to speak with like-minded people who are also trying to help our senior members of society live their best lives. Pat also enjoyed telling the wider UK Active Partnerships about FAM in a LLB online workshop. Thank you to all the organisers who made us feel very welcome and if you need any more information about FAM in the UK please don't hesitate to contact pat@funandmoving.com
We shared some of our human experiences in the lead up to EVOLVE, but we’d like to share Hiram’s story, to give a little more insight into what makes FAM tick.
Hiram Skaggs has been FAM’s CSO since April 2021. He joined Fun And Moving as the world was coming out of the Covid 19 pandemic. He knew about FAM and saw that what they were trying to do: to help people get moving again after months of incarceration and subsequent inactivity. People were dying before their time because they couldn’t do their usual activity which kept their diabetes, blood pressure, arthritis etc at bay.
In a recent interview, Hiram explains how he got involved with FAM…’the clock started ticking on the end of their life, we wanted to set that clock back, we wanted to give people more time, give people more quality of life, that’s why our routines are based on functional movement, everything we do has that in mind, that’s why everything is safe for arthritis, that’s why we have different levels, the seating, standing, bed routines, so we can make this totally accessible.
What’s so crazy and so great, is that we solved that problem of how to make it accessible and deliver this to the people who were most vulnerable. We do live in the wider fitness industry, but we are different, we’re not competing for the small percentage of the population that’s already fit, we’re for everybody else who can’t or don’t want to use the facilities and resources that are there for those fit few, we understand, we’re not trying to get you into a gym. If you want to get into a gym, great, we’ll help you get there, but more importantly, we help people with the worst issues across the board. Injuries and disease are no respecters of age.
I for example got hit by a truck, yes literally while out on my bike, rehab is not just for the elderly, right? And it took us a while to work out that FAM is a broader solution for more people. Our original identity was for elder care, it’s a good thing, but what we didn’t realise at first was that we were also a health tech company, we didn’t realise that we were a technology company at all, that we were broader. We had almost accidentally created a physical therapy, rehab and a larger solution for everyone.
Owning that and understanding that, has led us in the direction we are right now, and part of it for me, the reason I work here, is literally because I got hit by that truck! As I was doing my rehab I was finding myself getting more and more fed up with my job, I was getting frustrated basically because they were afraid of change. I got hit in October, it took me 6 months to realise that I wanted to work with FAM.
Using FAM I got out of the wheelchair, to walking again, and all the way rehabbed, and by April, I was ready to say goodbye to my last company. I literally had that “road to Damascus’ moment, I had a complete change of vision, and that was when I thought ‘OK, I need to go and look somewhere else’, and on top of that, FAM became an option.
It became a clear passion of something I wanted to do, something that was going to change the world, and change the destinies of our people. The second that became clear to me, it was hard to want to do anything else, this is a big deal. It’s not every day that you get the chance to change the destinies of entire groups of people world wide, and I think we do have that opportunity here.’