Lust for life ..5k and nearly a 10km run/jog

lustformoney wrote: »

yea ..Aware are a great organisation that do brilliant work around the country..pity they are gettin feck all from the entry fee,

After seeing the work these people it's brilliant stuff. Some of the stuff they have dealt with, no one should have to do it, but they are doing it for the people that need it.


I think you should research before commenting or even see the work they do.

Lustforlife is a charity


Ps I wonder how much the CEO of awareness takes home

Few facts :
Lust for Life is a limited company, 4 shareholders
Not set up as a charity or not for profit entity
State in their FAQs that they make money from sponsorships and running races
Beneficiaries are the 4 shareholders - Bressie, Derry and 2 other shareholders

Would be great if a percentage of race entries or profits went to stated charity, rather than your additional optional contribution

Approach is common enough unfortunately, for those who think it's a charity - do some basic checking.
Your choice what you support.

Website is good and building mental health awareness is good, just realise it's a commercial opportunity that is being leveraged as per their own FAQs

@average_runner can you explain what you mean when you say the funds they generate goes to helping people with mental illness? That kind of sounds very ambiguous- very like the text of their website. It sounds like the usual double speak we see with these sorts.

snailsong wrote: »

Anybody think it was unfortunate that they described their 10k race as a '10k Park Run'.
And that the ad in the indo featured a colour scheme similar to that of parkrun.
A Google search for parkrun brought their ad up on the first page when I last checked.

Seems to me that it might have been opportunistic rather than unfortunate

These people in my opinion are far far worse then those that seek to gain from ordinary runners through the promotion of commercial races - under the guise of "Promoting awareness for mental health" they seek to gain financially from creating an ambiguity surrounding their status and aims . They are a marketing organization whos sole aim is the promotion of their events for profit. they achieve this by exploiting peoples good-will , using other peoples concern for the state of mental health services in this country and in republishing other peoples work and or ideas and dressing them up as their own . In their Terms and conditions on their website it states :

"The purpose of this site is to provide access to a wide range of academic and practical articles and works relating to physical and mental health for the benefit of the public, students and practitioners.
All articles, works, blogs and observations will generally be left in their original form but short introductions may be written.
However, the site owners reserve the right to remove any material from the site for any reason and without notice.
The site owners acknowledge that the copyright in original works and articles has been retained by the authors and users of the site are on notice of this fact.
Nevertheless it is assumed that use of the material by students and researchers is permitted for private purposes e.g. University course work, subject to the usual academic rules on plagiarism. Permission to use the works or part of them must otherwise be obtained directly from the authors or publishers and not from the site owners.
The author of any work or article appearing on this site or linked site are entitled to remove the work or the link at any time and the site owners will honour any request by them to do so."
Let me translate this for you ... if we use your article we have the right to top and tail it with our verbiage making it look like ours ... you retain the copyright but you have to ask us to take it down ... doesn't sound to me like they are investing too much money in " Creating awareness"
And on the topic of money... from looking at the photos from today's " Lust For Cash" event at their " Pheonix Park Run " the highest number I saw was in the 6,600's ...so lets do a little math ...6600 -5% ( you have to give away some places ) is 6270 x €20 ( I'm using this as a median between the €18 and the €22 full price race entry ) is €125,400 including the Cork airport run and the additional 3 runs they are planning thats at a guesstimate €465,000....and NOTHING repeat nothing goes into the provision of any type of mental help service ...
If ever there was a case of an organization wearing the emperor's new clothes this is it and on this forum Average runner has demonstrated the gullibility of peoples need to believe the tripe that this " Social Enterprise" is putting out .

Purely and simply, these people are scumbags. They persistently tried to promote themselves as a 'Park Run' (their own words) to pretend they had some connection to parkrun Ireland. Despite various requests from parkrun Ireland to remove that wording they proceeded to promote themsleves as 'Phoenix Park run' for several more weeks before eventually relenting. Even in the last few weeks (despite previous actions) they were tagging several parkruns and parkrun Ireland in their tweets to create a false association to their audience. Parkrun Ireland had to block them from various social media because of this.

How many people falsely signed up to their race thinking their race was connected to parkrun or indeed was raising money for mental awareness charities? you can slag the like of Virgin Media all you want for associating themselves with charities but at least no-one in their right mind would think Virgin media are a charity. They might think L4L are however. L4l are masters of deception and reaping the rewards financially IMO. Hopefully they give a small donation to an actual mental awareness charity such as aware, but don't hold your breath.....

Just picking on the thread title - did the 10k route not measure out to be 10k?

glacial_pace71 wrote: »

I'd be the last to rush to defend Bressie's honour etc but there are probably a few points to be made to put the various matters in context.

Firstly the distinction between races in which the charity receives a share of the proceeds and those in which their revenue comes from the participants' fund-raising efforts. This is a long-running sore in athletics, as various sports and event management companies deliberately create a lot of ambiguity around their events and the revenue allocation.

However, A Lust For Life Ltd doesn't quite fall into the commercial 'event management company' model. Bressie's vehicle for the music/entertainment industry is Big Face Productions Ltd. The 'A Lust For Life Ltd' is a company with a parent in his My1000 Hours Ltd vehicle, which is not commercially oriented as such.

Of course people have every right to complain that the Lust for Life is presenting itself as being more charitable than being a social economic enterprise, but its still ring-fenced from the rest of the Bressie empire.

There's reference to Silver Hatch Productions Ltd. This is a perfectly legit English-registered sports management company, which has several Irish olympians signed to it. The company undertakes everything from negotiating commercial sponsorship, appearance fees, image rights etc for its clients. Presumably it gets a mention on the basis that it had to be involved to ensure that nothing A Lust for Life Ltd was undertaking would be in breach of other commercial contracts that the Bressie industry had already entered into. So leave Silver Hatch out of the equation when looking at the overall picture.

Many charities have signed up to revenue-generation mechanisms that provide very little return, but take the view that 100% of nothing is nothing. Hence the few cent in the euro from lending their names to Christmas cards' offerings, to calendars and so forth. Many charities would look on the 'awareness-raising' guff on the Lust For Life as being quite a positive add-on, i.e. it's not just an event management company putting the charity logo on something that's one-off but there's year-round 'goodwill' being generated. It's a big trade off for many charities to put up with this, but in this particular case they haven't any contractual arrangements in place with Lust for Life, it's just positive coverage. Those who enter races would need to keep their eyes open though, much in the way they do when entering events organised by commercial operators.

Leaving aside Bressie's Big Face Productions Ltd (for the music industry) see how My 1000 Hrs Ltd started with some general sports-related aims (plus plenty of the off-the-shelf company boiler-plate template material about what it can/will do) and then contrast with the much more refined basis for A Lust for Life Ltd, i.e. "physical well-being activities". (See attachments).

Glacial Pace, thanks for the information about the group structure/ related companies and copies of the Companies Registration Office documents/ Memoranda of Association.

However the documents are used at initial company registration / formation and are incomplete in terms of all of the objectives. Virtually all company memoranda have a cover all clause at the end of the objectives saying the company can do whatever the directors agree in the interests of the company. This is to ensure that the company or the directors are not acting "ultra vires" and can engage in new business ventures as the opportunity arises.

Personally, I don't care what activities the companies engage in, as private companies limited by shares the company will engage in whatever activities are profitable and drive profit for the company, increase value of the brand and ultimately deliver profit/return on investment for the shareholders. Event management, selling sponsorship/ naming rights such as VHI etc are all commercially profitable opportunities as outlined above.
Not taking direct payments to named shareholders does not preclude payments to related parties (family member, significant other, related companies or offshore vehicles) or taking interest free loans or dividends out of profits. That is their perogative how the directors decide to run the company.

It's a strong commercially astute profitable business in the current climate with the added benefit of creating awareness but let's not confuse a commercial business idea created for the shareholders to benefit directly or indirectly (in their other businesses) with a charity.

Filed accounts will probably take small companies exemption to file abridged accounts so don't expect anything more than an opening and closing balance sheet with scant information on the Profit and Loss and cash flows