Meet our team

Our Founders

Kate Scott

Kate’s family farm near Oundle in Northamptonshire. Like Robert, Kate studied at Harper Adams University and is now the farm’s secretary alongside her work at a local National Trust site. She has been a tireless supporter of mental health awareness since Robert’s death, raising over £40,000 for PAPYRUS in his memory through her Harvest Ball. She is now channelling that determination and commitment into the foundation.

  • “Back in July 2014, my world turned upside down when my dad rang to say that Robert, my little brother, had taken his own life at 29.

    Robert, or Rob to his friends, was the life and soul of the party and loved hanging out with his mates. Polite and charming, he always made time to speak to people and ask how they were. He also loved farming, working on our family farm with Dad and was in the early stages of taking over from him.

    Since Robert’s passing, I’ve become more aware of the lack of dedicated mental health support locally for agricultural and rural communities, and have also struggled with my own mental health. Counselling has helped me massively as has ploughing my grief into raising money for PAPYRUS (Prevention of Young Suicide). As a family we chose this charity because we didn't want other families to go through what we went through, and still go through, and because we know that the money raised from the balls will make a genuine difference to somebody that’s struggling.

    Fast forward to today. I met Lewis, Max’s brother, at last year’s ball and we immediately connected through our shared pains and struggles. As strong advocates for raising awareness around mental health and the prevention of suicide, we have come together to create The Rural Communities Mental Health (RCMH) Foundation and plug an important gap in the communities our brothers were part of. 

    That day back in July 2014 will never leave me - I remember it like it was yesterday and it would play on repeat if I let it. But slowly life moves on and you find new purpose. I’ve trained as a Mental Health First Aider and recently became ASIST trained (Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training) in suicide first aid through LivingWorks. I have two sons who know all about their Uncle Robert and have found the Harvest Balls hugely rewarding as a way of keeping Robert’s memory alive. 

    Now the foundation is the next step on that journey.”

Lewis Hunter

Lewis runs his family’s mixed farm alongside his father Gavin in Cambridgeshire. Established back in 1947, they have a successful herd of Devon cattle, who graze 200 acres of permanent pasture, and grow wheat, barley and oilseed rape over 1,000 acres of arable land on chalky boulder clay.

  • “Max was two years older than me. Growing up we went to the same school and worked together on the family farm during our holidays. Max went to Cirencester Agricultural College to study agriculture after he left school in 2009, eventually living in Wansford working for Anglia Grain Seed after jobs at Strutt & Parker and on a dairy farm in Kenya for a few months. 

    He would spend his spare time in the evenings and weekends helping out on the farm, playing rugby for Stamford or out socialising somewhere in the country; like Robert, he was always the life and soul of any party he was at.

    Yet on 24 August 2019, Max decided to take his own life at the age of only 28. This was something that came as a complete shock to everyone who had ever been lucky enough to meet him; he was the last person you would expect to suffer from poor mental health.

    On New Year’s Day 2020 we did a fundraising walk around a few local farms for PAPYRUS and to raise awareness for mental health. This raised £10,000 and was a testament to how popular Max was and how much he is missed by his friends and family. 

    Max and Robert were good friends but I didn’t meet Kate until her Harvest Ball in September 2023. It was here that the seed was planted to start a mental health charity; I’m so proud that we’re now launching that charity in memory of Max and Robert.”

Our Trustees

Laura Sloman

Laura is a business professional who helps companies primarily with strategy, growth, company culture, compliance and operational efficiency. She has a Law LLB (Hons) degree from the University of Edinburgh and began her career as a management consultant at Accenture, followed by an 8 year period at Goldman Sachs investment bank, where she ran large scale, regulatory change and technology programmes.

In more recent years, Laura was the CEO of a health tech company, where she scaled the company to become a key supplier to NHS England for weight management services, and her most recent role was COO at another scale up company, helping children with different learning, nutritional and behavioural needs. She’s incredibly passionate about helping companies grow, and cares deeply about developing people and teams.

Hannah Rose

Hannah is a partner of an international law firm. She specialises in investment funds and is recognised in the legal industry as being technically excellent and always commercial and pragmatic. 

Hannah was born and raised in Bedford and has always lived in semi-rural or rural communities. She appreciates the unique pressures on mental health that come with rural work and is confident that, together, we can make a difference in the collective mental health of our agricultural community.

Anna Watts

Anna is a professional marketer and a farmer’s daughter. She studied languages at Newcastle before starting her career client-side in the Marketing team for leading animal feed manufacturer Dodson & Horrell. Working closely with creative agencies during this time, she made the switch to agency-side before setting up her own business in 2016. Having managed clients from multinationals to SMEs and those in the third sector, she’s as passionate about relationship building as she is delivering impactful, engaging work. 

With her farming background, she understands the way of life and what it’s like to be a farming family, the highs and lows, and the weight on people’s mental wellbeing, all of which combine to drive her passion for the foundation.