Tucked away on Frederick Street in Cardiff's city centre is the Bigmoose coffee shop. A popular brunch stop, the cafe serves pancakes, bagels, cakes, coffee and much more. But since it opened in 2014 the cafe has provided more than food to its customers.
The not-for-profit café was set up by father and daughter team, Chloe and Jeff Smith, as part of their wider charity Bigmoose. Jeff, 58, set up the charity as a legacy for his best friend Gary 'Moose' Cloonan after his tragic death from cancer in 2007. Now, the charity is on a mission to raise £1 million by the end of the year to help people with their mental health, prevent suicide, and reduce homelessness.
"Bigmoose began in 2014, and it was just a way of us doing good stuff. It's a legacy for my dad's best friend who passed away from cancer and it's named after him because his nickname was 'Moose.' Everything we do is about giving back and leaving the world better than we found it," Chloe said.
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Jeff met Gary at the Streatham Redskins Ice Hockey Club in South London, having joined when he was 18, and the two became close friends, with Jeff acting as Gary's best man at his wedding. Tragically, Gary was diagnosed with cancer which spread to his liver. He passed away in 2007, with Jeff vowing to 'get the most out of [his] time on this planet.'
“It kind of inspired me, strangely, to actually decide with my own life that I would try and live it to the fullest and try to make sure that I maximised everything that I was doing with my own life and not end up with any regrets,” Jeff said. “I concentrated on doing the best I could do with the life I was given.”
Between them, Chloe and Jeff have a range of impressive achievements. Jeff is an Everest summiteer and a Marathon de Sables finisher, while Chloe had climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and run a 42-mile ultramarathon by the time she was 22. Jeff attempted Everest for the first time in 2014 and says he was inspired by Chloe, who was the youngest Welsh woman to reach the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro at the age of 15. Jeff used to play ice hockey for the Cardiff Devils, but said that since he’d retired, he’d “lost excitement in [his] life.”
“She’s very much an inspiration to me as a dad and has inspired me to do other things,” Jeff said of Chloe. Jeff went to Nepal in 2014 to attempt Everest for the first time and Gary’s widow had also given him his ashes in the hopes that Jeff would be able to scatter them at the summit.
However, an accident on the mountain in which 16 Sherpas died meant the trip was cut short out of respect for those who had been killed. After a meeting at Everest base camp, Jeff says the decision was made that the climb wouldn’t continue and the groups returned home.
“That was what actually inspired me to start Bigmoose. I’d done some fundraising for Teenage Cancer Trust,” Jeff said. Turning 50 that year, Jeff said that he had decided to attempt to raise £50,000 and ended up beating his target to raise £60,000. The money went to the Cardiff branch of the Teenage Cancer Trust.
“Coming back from the mountain not having had an opportunity to summit, I could have got a bit down-hearted and be disappointed, which I was, but what I also came back with was an adrenaline-fueled desire to do something big for the world,” he said. “I’d found my passion which was helping people so actually making that commitment to fundraise and achieve and seeing the children with cancer in the TCT wards at UHW [University Hospital Wales] was very inspiring to me, and just made me think to myself ‘I probably want to do more of this.’”
Jeff also completed the Marathon de Sables in Morocco, despite having two false hips. “My surgeon had said to me ‘The only thing I would say not to do with two false hips is to do marathons.’” But, having returned from his first attempt at Everest in 2015, Jeff said he’d found a 100km ultramarathon called Race to the Stones, which was set to take place on his birthday. “I thought ‘This is a sign,’ I’m going to do this ultra race.
“I didn’t do a marathon, so I didn’t go against my surgeon’s orders - I did an ultra-marathon which was quite fun,” he said. Feeling that he could do something more, Jeff signed up to the Marathon de Sables, which takes place in the Sahara Desert, and made it to the finish line. In 2017, Jeff returned to Everest and was able to reach the summit.
Jeff and Chloe set up the Bigmoose charity in 2014, with a three-point plan: helping those struggling with their mental health, preventing suicide, and preventing homelessness. Jeff says that being able to work with his daughter is “absolutely brilliant” and that he is “enjoying every minute of it.” “I think we compliment each other really well. She tolerates my insanity and my wild dreams that I come up with and rather than poo-pooing things, she’s very much a support,” he said. Their project to raise £1 million this year is among their biggest yet.
"What we were finding over the last couple of years and since we started Bigmoose in general was that mental health was becoming more and more of a problem and we were hearing more and more people, friends, family, team members, who were struggling. We were thinking 'Maybe this is something we could help with,'" Chloe said.
Chloe, 27, added that during lockdown things "came to a head" as Bigmoose began to hear of more people who were struggling with their mental health. Bigmoose had access to one therapist at the time and put people in contact with them.
"During that lockdown period, we had five people tell us that, without our intervention, they would have ended their life," Chloe said. "Dad and I just said to each other, 'we need to do more.' My dad is an ideas man, he's a creative, and he comes up with amazing dreams and schemes. He texted me one day to say that he'd come up with an idea. Whenever my dad says that, something big is coming."
Jeff had told Chloe that Bigmoose would need more money in order to provide more people with therapy, she said. "We needed to go big because the money is needed and hopefully by going big we will create some attention and it will get people excited and wanting to be involved," Chloe explained. So, the pair decided to aim for the £1 million mark.
"For us, it's about saving lives and supporting people as best we can really," Chloe said. Bigmoose works with an institute called Human Givens, which has a database of 300 therapists.
"For us, because Human Givens are just so impactful with the way that they work, we're seeing people only needing three or four sessions. That's where we feel we can make the biggest difference," Chloe said. "We're getting messages every day from people saying things like, 'You guys have saved my life.' I don't understand how it's been so impactful in such a short space of time but it really has. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I probably wouldn't believe it."
Bigmoose has linked up with some therapists in the Human Givens network, interviewing them before hand. The therapists have to be registered with Human Givens beforehand in order to work with Bigmoose, Chloe said. Lots of the therapy is being done online, Chloe said, with some therapists even based in America.
"What we were finding over here was that 9am to 5pm is the hours that therapists often work, but obviously if you're in work, it's really difficult to take time off and get to the sessions," Chloe said. Some of the therapists are also based in Cardiff and able to provide face to face sessions.
So far, over £42,600 has been raised for Project 1 million through their JustGiving page, with people raising money for the project in a variety of ways. "We've got quite a few businesses involved who have adopted us as charity of the year, [people have done] a variety of sporting activities and cake sales, that sort of thing. We've got some amazing runners doing ultramarathons, cycling - big sporting stuff is the main one," Chloe said.
"Every £50 or £100 makes such a difference and allows us to pay for sessions, so we've done an A-Z of fundraising ideas. Even if you are not into sport, you can do cakes sales or charity clothing shops, fashion shows, quiz nights, a real variety," Chloe added. The team have set themselves the challenge of raising the £1 million by the end of December this year.
The coffee shop opened its doors in 2018, when Chloe was just 23, and acts as the trading entity of Bigmoose. "We see the coffee shop as the beating heart of what we do and it allows us to meet people and spread our message."
"We lost my dad's best mate, Gary Cloonan, to cancer in 2007. It really affected my dad in a way that mortality hadn't before. Losing grandparents and stuff is part of life, but losing your best friend at the age of 42 is just way too young. It was really really tough on him. He just looked at his life and thought 'I just want to live every single day to the fullest, I never want to have regrets and I want to just give back,'" Chloe said.
"It really has grown organically because it started off as a Facebook page and we were going down to the homeless shelter in Cardiff and giving out hot food and drinks and it's just really grown. The coffee shop is kind of where it all really revved up because it allowed us to have a presence on the high street and allowed people to come in and support us, and it gave people a really easy way to see what we were doing by just buying a coffee."
She continued: "We've looked on average people needing four therapy sessions to feel better as their course of treatment, so with admin fees, the fees of the room, and the fees of the therapist, that's on average about £100 a session. So, £400 allows us to support one person through a course of treatment. That's become quite an important number to us as well, the £400 mark."
Bigmoose runs a range of projects in addition to Project 1 million and the coffee shop. Every year, they put together a team of Bigmoose runners to take part in the Cardiff Half Marathon to raise money to support the charity's work.
The charity also holds the Bigmoose Supertri, a triathlon for disabled children. The triathlon welcomes 'every child [...] no matter their disability' and participants take part in a swim, cycle, and run, with every child being presented with a medal, certificate and goodie bag at the end.
“It’s been quite a journey, a fantastic journey, so far,” Jeff said of Project 1 Million. “At the beginning of the year, I don’t think I would have expected quite so many people to have given us testimonials saying that we’d saved their lives, and that’s really impactful.”
