The people
behind present*
Two
founders.
One from the street. One from the coalface.
Both on the ground.
Neither behind a desk.
Co-Founder
Spud
He goes by Spud. There's a reason for that.
Nobody writes poems about potatoes. Nobody puts them in the window. They don't perform. They don't ask to be noticed.
They just feed people.
Quietly. Every day. Without making a fuss. Spud has been doing that for thirty years. On the Ravenhill Road in East Belfast. In the rooms nobody else wanted to be in. For the men nobody else was coming for. Addicts. Ex-offenders. Fathers who'd lost their way. Boys becoming men with nothing to guide them and nobody to show them how.
No framework. No protocol. No slide deck.
Just presence.
Founder of Rumble. Thirty years of community-rooted work reaching and equipping men across Ireland and beyond. Credibility earned not in a boardroom but on the ground. Face to face. With the men everyone else had written off.
That's where present* was born.
Not in a meeting.
On a road.
Co-Founder
Ishbel Straker
She goes where most people won't.
Into academies. Into the hardest corners of the health system. Into the room where a sixteen year old boy has just been told by a Premier League football club that it's done with him. That his identity — the only one he's ever known — is over.
Most people send a leaflet.
Ishbel walks through the door.
Psychiatric Nurse Prescriber. CEO of ISC Care and Pause Wellbeing. Founder of the Regulatory Justice Foundation CIC. TV mental health expert. Thirty years of frontline expertise across health, policy and media.
Those credentials open doors.
What happens once she's through them is what built present*
Ishbel understands not just what is happening to men and boys — but exactly why. And what it takes to change it. Because she's been changing it. One room, one boy, one man at a time.
From the coalface.
Not the sidelines.
Together.
Most organisations have one or the other.
The lived experience.
Or the expertise.
present* has both.
In two people.
Who actually work together.
The street and the coalface.
The instinct and the evidence.
The Ravenhill Road and Anfield.
Belfast and Liverpool.
In the room. At the same time.
Nobody else has that.
Nobody.
