Belfast entrepreneur Nuala Murphy hopes to improve the lives of people she has never met. Murphy is in the middle of raising seed-round funding to bring a new mental health support app to market that she believes has global potential.
The app, which she has developed with clinicians and healthcare professionals, is aimed at new and expectant mums and their families.
It will screen for perinatal, postnatal and associated anxieties with additional features such as a guide to coping strategies.
Like many self-starters Murphy has ambitious plans for momenthealthapp.com, which she hopes to launch this year. But that is where the difference between her and other aspiring entrepreneurs ends.
Murphy has a well-established reputation in the North for not only making promises but delivering on them tenfold.
Already she has an established business behind her. She is the managing director of Belfast-based Malone Marketing.
However, independent of that, she is also rapidly developing a reputation as one of the next generation of female business leaders in the North.
Two years ago Murphy decided to set up a small group that revolved around a cause close to her heart. Just after she had her second son, she read Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook.
She identified with many of the themes in the book not only the challenges women face with work and family life, but also how passionate Sandberg was about encouraging women to support each other.
Group of women
Murphy decided to bring together a small group of women in the North. In a short space of time, just by word of mouth alone, there were 100 members of the group.
Today Murphy’s group has 1,000 members and is the official Belfast chapter of the Lean In initiative, which is one of 30,000 circles in 154 countries.
She is very keen to stress that it is not a club for women only and the Belfast chapter is open to everyone.
Murphy believes the reason Lean In in Belfast has been so successful so quickly is that it answers what had been a void in the North – despite the proliferation of business organisation that already existed.
“I was fed up going to business events that were not diverse. We know from research that diverse teams are successful teams, they are more productive and they have a different perspective, which is good for business.
“So equality isn’t just a women’s issue – it is an issue for everyone and every business that’s why Lean In Belfast is open to everyone at any stage in their professional career who believes in equality of opportunity. I have always believed that when we surround each other with the right people we can achieve anything – and we are doing that in Belfast,” Murphy says.
Since the Belfast chapter began she says it has received amazing support from local businesses and organisations who offered both practical and morale boosting help.
“As we have grown and more people got to know about what we were doing we have had offers of venues, training and help, and it really just took off. People embraced it and we know the support and network has made a difference in women’s lives.
“Having more equality in the workplace is not just good for individual businesses, it is good for the whole economy and that is good for Northern Ireland,” Murphy said.
Better opportunities
She is currently working on launching Lean In Ireland and plans to bring Sheryl Sandberg to Belfast to see how she has inspired other women to make a difference in their lives.
In the meantime, Murphy’s enthusiasm and passion for the Belfast chapter is just one of the reasons why one of the North’s biggest IT inward investor has got together with Lean In Belfast to launch a new initiative in Northern Ireland that aims to tackle the issue of inequality in the workplace and encourage both men and women to work together to create better opportunities for everyone.
Allstate Northern Ireland, which was established in Belfast in 1999 and has 2,300 staff in the North across three locations, will roll out the first ALLtogetherNI programmes with Lean In Belfast.
Angela Byrne, a senior manager with AllState NI, who is also chairwoman of Allstate’s Women in Technology NI network, is backing the project. Both Byrne and Murphy hope it will have a life-changing impact on its participants because they believe that this is the hashtag for the future: #wecannotbewhatwecannotsee.
