Sarah Davis

Driven by Connection: Sarah Davis on Cars, Community & Mental Health

By Kate Peck

When Sarah Davis co-founded Drive Against Depression (DAD) with her husband Adam, she wasn’t setting out to run a charity. She was simply trying to help the man she loved navigate his mental health — and discovered the open road could be the perfect place for connection.

Seven and a half years later, that idea has grown into a national registered mental health charity. DAD runs driving events across Australia that unite people through their shared passion for cars, creating an easy, non-judgmental environment for connection and conversation — often the first step toward seeking help.

“You don’t have to talk about your mental health straight away — sometimes talking about cars is enough to build trust.”

When Sarah started the charity, her girls were tiny - her eldest just four years old and her youngest in a baby carrier. Sarah still vividly remembers the first event. “I had the baby strapped to me while my eldest waved this handmade ‘Drive Against Depression’ sign, pointing cars into the car park,” she recalls.

“We’ve never separated the charity from our family life,” she says. “It’s just part of who we are.”

The earliest drives were small and informal. Friends would gather, go for a cruise, and throw $20 into a pot for Beyond Blue or the Black Dog Institute. But the real value wasn’t in the fundraising — it was in the conversations that happened in the car parks, at the coffee stops, and along the winding country roads.

Now, the events create safe, informal spaces where people connect over their shared passion for cars, with professional and lived-experience mental health speakers on hand.

Why Cars?

“Because that's what my husband needed, when we couldn't figure out how to help him - he needed to go for a drive. He needed to go for a drive and he needed to have a conversation with somebody he trusted. And the thing about sitting in a car and having a conversation, you don't even need to look at each other. 

There's no confrontation, you can be looking in different directions and the car provides this incredible capsule almost for these really honest raw conversations. We find it even with families who come along on the drive. So many other parents I talked to talked about having these very awkward conversations with teenagers, who were able to work things out on a drive because there's none of that confrontational feeling of judgement. 

When Adam needed help and I didn't know what to do as a partner, I was feeling pretty lost and scared. It was him going out for a drive with a mate when he started to talk. I thought - Oh wow. Okay. Right, so that worked. Let's do that again.”

Interestingly, the research backs up Sarah’s initial observation — people are 60% more likely to seek professional help after a conversation with someone they trust. Drive Against Depression harnesses that principle, using cars as the bridge to build trust and community.

“Something we do is alternate the integration of professional experts, professional mental health experts, but also with experienced experts because there's enormous power in sharing stories. You go from seeing people who have this feeling like nobody else can understand what's going on. And nobody else has felt like this, and I'm the only one who could possibly be feeling like this. And then you start hearing people share stories and all of a sudden they realise that they're not alone and everyone's story is different, but they’re not as alone as they thought they were, and that's huge.”

The events.

Today, Melbourne events attract up to 100 participants, while Brisbane, Sydney, and Adelaide see around 30–35 people — and they’re preparing to launch in Tasmania. DAD runs four events a year in Melbourne, and two in each of the other cities. Event participation is donation-based thanks to the support of partners and a dedicated team of 12 - all volunteers - working tirelessly behind the scenes.

“We're building a community of like-minded others. And whether that’s men, women, families, younger people, older people, it's all about the connection and the love of driving, the love of cars. Clubs can inherently become a little bit exclusive and that's exactly the opposite of what we want. We don't want people to feel like they have to have a certain car or be in a certain state to be able to come. We want people to come as they are with what they like to drive. You know what, bring what you hate to drive and tell us why you hate it.”

Sarah, what does your role involve as managing director? 

“It’s a bit of everything. It’s very operations-heavy. I’m involved in all of our events, and a lot of focus on the strategic outlook of the charity with our extremely dedicated board. My role also involves coordinating our volunteers, looking at things like how do we engage our community more? How do we share the message further? It's also a lot about engaging with partners. Being a charity there's a commercial and a financial reality that we can't escape with what we're doing (despite the service that we want to provide for the community) without cost to them.”

Alongside her voluntary role as Managing Director, Sarah is a qualified career practitioner and currently works in student services at a secondary school in Adelaide. 

“It's an interesting role. We've got lots of complex needs. Kids with lots of stuff going on in their worlds, which I look at from a mental health perspective. I look at what adults are dealing with, what I see through the charity, and then look at what young people are doing and go wow, young people have a lot more going on than what I certainly remember when I was young - they're working through pretty complex stuff.” 

It’s a lot. Tell us about the juggle struggle - balancing all this plus kids and a full-time job?

“And trying to keep our mental health on board too! Yep, sometimes it's hard. I’m not going to lie. Sometimes we look at it and at this stage of life think does it really make sense for us to be running a charity? And then we show up at an event where we bring 80 people together who need to be there and we hear their stories and someone taps me on the shoulder and says, ‘I've got your email about participating and it came on a day when I really needed it.”

Sarah reflects on the saying that mental illness isn't contagious, but she suggests that it kind of is. “When you're so focused on looking after somebody else, you're not looking after yourself as this support person. So another thing that we do with the charity is connect with support people, with partners, with people who know what it's like to worry about their loved ones mental health, and we want to look after them too. "

Oh I agree, I know that if my partner's in a horrific mood I am as well! Talk to us about the ripple effect of what you’re doing. 

“We can't always measure the ripple effect and the indirect impact that we're having. When you arrive at a [drive] day and see how much it means to people, you see how much people are taking steps to look after themselves - steps that they haven't taken before they came to our events or that they didn't feel comfortable talking about before they came to our events. How can you stop doing this? We have to find a way we have to keep going. So it doesn't take us long even when we're tired to look at and go, we're tired and we need to do something that maybe looks a bit like self-care, because we can’t not do this.”

Even without a spreadsheet of statistics, the impact is clear — people come away feeling less alone, more connected, and sometimes ready to take their first step toward professional help.

Sarah’s hope for the future is simple: that more people see mental ill-health as something you can talk about, without shame.

“If we can help even one person feel safe enough to open up, then it’s worth it,” she says.