Dad La Soul: Tackling Social Isolation for Dads with Dan Flanagan

Mid-life Men: the mental health podcast

Dan Flanagan is a father and founder of Dad La Soul, an award-winning social impact organisation that focuses on tackling social isolation for dads. He shares his experience of struggling with being a dad and feeling like an outsider at mother and baby classes. He also reflects on his struggles with juggling his career, his father's illness, and how he found himself spending too much time on his phone at work and not experiencing fatherhood as he wanted to.
After a bout of illness, Dan decided to stop missing out on his son’s life, reprioritised his work to do so but he still found that he felt isolated, and parenthood was not set for fathers. Dan believed that if the support wasn’t out there, he needed to build it himself.
He realised that other men felt the same and so he started running playdates with other dads that were fun and based on his love of music. Dad la Soul was founded, and Dan has gone on to grow the organisation and provide a valuable and sometimes life-saving community for other dads in the same situation.

To find out more about Dad La Soul and Dan’s work, visit the website https://www.dadlasoul.com/.

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