Written by Jane, the mother of Ellen and a Trustee for M10 Missions

There’s a famous saying ‘give me a boy until he’s 7 and I’ll give you the man’.  Yet I’d add about 10 years to that as I think the experiences you have up to the age of about 17/18 all impact the adult you become.

My daughter Ellen went on the M10 trip to Ensenada, Mexico a couple of weeks after her 17th birthday. She had been shy as a child, hated being asked to speak in front of the class, and nearly every school report encouraged her to ‘find her voice’.

However, despite being quiet, Ellen always was always interested in people who had sought to make society better (Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King etc), she always looked out for others and was always wanting to do her bit to fight injustice.  At age 16 she was interviewed by Stephen Riley for a place on the Mexico trip the following summer.  From that followed 9 months of team sessions and so much fundraising

The trip itself, in so many ways, shaped what Ellen has done ever since.  Ellen did find her voice, and for someone with little co-ordination, amazingly she even found skills with a hammer when contributing to the house build. But that M10 trip was so much more than any of us expected.  Ellen found her place in a team, despite the fact that none of her friends went, and she’d had to make completely new friends.  She saw first hand what it was like to live in a field with only basic shelter, what lives children were born into where poverty was all they knew, and she saw hope in the life given to children in an orphanage.  I remember having tears in my eyes seeing the video of Ellen’s M10 group handing over the keys to the family they’d built the house for.

Ellen came back determined to make a difference in the world.  She went off to Uni and then  spent her 19th birthday in South Africa as part of a 6 week solo trip she made.  In various places across South Africa, she volunteered on a Rhino sanctuary, helped in a womens’ refuge and taught in an orphanage.  We weren’t surprised when after graduating, her first job was working in London for Save the Children, working initially as a Child Survival Co-ordinator and later as a Communications assistant and Project Manager with a team aiming to combat poverty and nutrition in adolescents. The role involved some travel to Bangladesh and Cote d’Ivoire. All of these roles meant the same to Ellen as her time in Ensenada – it was about positively impacting the lives of those less fortunate than herself.

After a few years Ellen left Save the Children and took 6 months out to travel across South America and Africa, something I don’t believe she would ever have done had she not been through the M10 trip.  During lockdown, she worked at Brooke, providing sexual education to young disadvantaged people, before taking on a whole new career direction.  Ellen qualified as a Prison Officer while studying for a masters degree, and has worked up the ranks in Wandsworth Prison.  She now leads the Reform Team in the Prison, trying to ensure better outcomes for the many prisoners on reform, who are particularly vulnerable.

M10 may seem like ‘just’ a trip, but I strongly believe it shaped everything Ellen did after it.  She’s 30 now and has the same passion to change the world as she did on the first day in Ensenada.  If you’re thinking about signing up to the Mexico trip – do it!