Who's leading the yawn wave?
Yawns roll up to each school, workplace and community group. Start one for your organisation and climb the board.
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🌍 yawns counted worldwide
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your yawns
Every Monday · 8:30 PM UK · 30 minutes
Join inRun this for your community
Find out howGo See Bury
Count it · Notice it · Switch it up — little actions around your borough
Ambassadors
Crucial Crew
Ambassador
Crucial Crew
Volunteer
Crucial Crew
Project
Project
The Great Big Yawn
A grassroots mental wellbeing & cultural change movement — helping people move from boredom, apathy and exhaustion to hope, creativity and connection.
Building Hope, Connection & Wellbeing Across Bury, Lancashire & Beyond
The Great Big Yawn is a contagious grassroots movement for mental wellbeing, community cohesion and cultural change. Through daily mindful yawning challenges, live community yawnathons, woodland wellbeing days and local land regeneration projects, we help workplaces, schools, families and communities move from boredom, apathy and exhaustion to relief, creativity and hope.
Our Safe Room at Crucial Crew
Crucial Crew is a multi-agency child safety campaign delivered annually to Year 6 children across Bury, Bolton and beyond. Greater Manchester Police, Greater Manchester Fire & Rescue Service, drug awareness and road safety teams run real-life safety scenarios — and The Great Big Yawn provides a calm, consent-led Safe Room where children can pause, breathe and reset between sessions.
58,073
Recorded yawns
5,257
Children & teachers supported
121
Schools across Belle Vue, Bury & Bolton
132
Teacher & assistant feedback forms
📋 What Schools Told Us (132 forms from Bury & Bolton)
97%
Learnt something new
93%
Left relaxed / calm
98%
Felt safe in the room
90%
Yawning observed by staff
🥱 Help Us Reach More Children
Add your yawn to our Safe Room research — a quick survey that helps us take this work to more schools.
Where Your Money Goes
Real photos from the land we're regenerating together — with room for more projects to come.
Present Projects
Present · raking
Present · on the plot
Present · together
Past Projects
Past · on site
Past · clearing
Past · community
Choose Your Way In
You don't need to fit into one neat box. You simply need to care about people, communities and the living world around us.
Become a Yawning Ambassador
Take the message of permission, relief, connection and creativity into communities, schools, organisations and everyday conversations.
- Introduce Yawnology safely
- Facilitate inclusive group experiences
- Help people move from exhaustion to curiosity
- Support campaigns and Yawnathons
- Gather stories and meaningful outcomes
- Join the UK and international network
Become a Volunteer
Volunteers are the heartbeat of our community projects. You might help in a garden, support a woodland day, welcome visitors, or simply help another person feel included.
- Community gardening
- Woodland restoration & site-care days
- Event preparation & welcoming
- Environmental observations
- Water-measurement projects
- Supporting community events
Join as a Facilitator
Do you have a skill, practice or programme that could support people, groups or communities? We are building a trusted network of insured and responsible facilitators.
- Counselling & wellbeing
- Bushcraft & outdoor learning
- Drumming, sound & creative workshops
- Community education
- Nature connection & land regeneration
- Specialist experiences within safety requirements
Regenerate yourself. Regenerate community.
Regenerate the world around you.
What if the part of you that has always wanted to help could finally become part of something bigger—without having to become someone else first?
The Great Big Yawn is bringing together ordinary, extraordinary people who are ready to turn overwhelm into possibility, ideas into action and individual gifts into real community regeneration.
Whether you train as an Ambassador, offer your time as a volunteer or bring your skills as a facilitator, your contribution becomes part of a living ecosystem—supporting people, restoring places and helping new thoughts grow into healthier behaviours.
Every conversation matters. Every seed planted matters. Every person witnessed matters. Every yawn of relief matters.
One Living Ecosystem
The way we think affects the way we behave. The way we behave affects our families, workplaces, communities and the land around us. When people are constantly overwhelmed, exhausted or disconnected, they often repeat the same patterns simply because their nervous systems cannot see another way forward.
The Great Big Yawn creates spaces where people can pause, reconnect and begin again. Through Yawnology, community projects, woodland retreats, education, citizen research, volunteering and shared experiences, we help people turn tired thoughts into fresh possibilities—and fresh possibilities into new behaviours.
A person feels safer → a family communicates differently → a community begins working together → a neglected space begins to thrive → the wider ecosystem responds.
This is regeneration from the inside out.
We're not just training people up.
We create a contagious yawn of relief around the globe — showing people how to pivot quickly into hope, creativity and possibility, individually through the yawn, then as a community with projects on the land, and globally by connecting together.
Land owners who are overwhelmed but want to share what they have with their local community — to stop isolation, boredom and exhaustion and bring in support that truly makes a difference. We are growing food together, sharing it, cooking it together and clearing spaces that are overgrown, overlooked and underestimated — just like the yawn — into spaces expanding naturally together.
"I wonder what else you could bring to the table for us to enjoy together — do get in touch and let us know."
Regeneration is About Restoring Belief
Regeneration is not only about planting trees or restoring land. It is also about restoring people's belief that their presence matters.
Many people have spent years feeling overlooked, underestimated, overworked or disconnected from their own creativity. When people feel safe enough to participate again, something changes. They begin offering ideas. They begin helping each other. They begin noticing what the land needs. They begin imagining a future they actually want to live in.
Not through shame. Not through more pressure. Through permission, witnessing, participation and meaningful action.
You Do Not Have to Save the World Alone
The beautiful planet we want to live on will not be created by one heroic person doing everything. It will be created by thousands of people making smaller, braver choices together.
Regenerate Your Thoughts. Create New Behaviours.
You do not need to know exactly where you fit before making contact. Tell us what calls to you, what experience you already have and what you would love to contribute or learn. We will help you find your place within the growing ecosystem.
Permission to pause. Space to reconnect. Courage to create what comes next.
Help us turn yawns into hope
The Great Big Yawn is powered by people, not profit. Your donation keeps the woodland open, the community yawnathons running and the daily wellbeing drops reaching people who need them — moving boredom, exhaustion and apathy towards creativity, connection and hope.
Every yawn, every pound — it all adds up to hope.
