About
Connor Poole is climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, in memory of his best friend Ali Sexton. The ascent is set for 31 August 2026 and runs over seven days to a summit at 5,895m, more than four times the height of Ben Nevis. He is raising money for Men And Their Emotions, a small UK men's mental-health charity. The climb is the latest and largest step in a campaign he has been building for Ali across several challenges.
The cause is men's mental health and suicide prevention. Connor lost Ali to suicide and frames the whole effort as carrying his friend's memory up the mountain. He does not share details of how Ali died beyond what he has chosen to make public. He picked Men And Their Emotions for the community the team has built and the awareness they are raising, and he routes every donation to the charity rather than to himself.
He did not start with Kilimanjaro. He first summited UK peaks one at a time for Ali, then took on the Yorkshire Three Peaks in under twelve hours, then the National Three Peaks in under twenty-four. Each was harder than the last. Kilimanjaro is the deliberate next rung, a high-altitude trek that asks far more of him than any of the climbs before it. The trip is self-funded, so the costs come out of his own pocket and not the donations.
Everything for this challenge runs off two surfaces he controls. There is a JustGiving page in his own name, set with a target of one pound for every metre of the summit, and there are the announcement reels he posts to his personal Instagram. There is no separate campaign hub, no merchandise, and no corporate sponsor behind the climb. The fundraiser is early and the audience for it is small.
Highlights
- The climb
- Mount Kilimanjaro, a 7-day ascent to a 5,895m summit
- Date
- 31 August 2026
- Cause
- Men's mental health and suicide prevention via Men And Their Emotions
- Goal
- One pound per metre of the summit, a self-funded trip
- The build-up
- UK peaks, the Yorkshire Three Peaks, then the National Three Peaks for the same cause
Deeper Dive
A high-altitude ascent is a different shape of charity challenge from the walks, runs, and swims that fill most fundraising pages. Kilimanjaro is a seven-day trek to 5,895m, the highest point on the African continent, where the difficulty is altitude and endurance rather than distance alone. Connor has tied the ask directly to that number, setting the goal at one pound per metre of elevation. The mountain and the target are the same figure, which makes the cost of the effort and the size of the ask legible at a glance.
The climb reads differently once you see the campaign behind it. Connor built up to this over a sequence of harder and harder efforts for the same friend and the same cause: individual UK peaks, then the Yorkshire Three Peaks under twelve hours, then the National Three Peaks under twenty-four hours, which raised more than ten thousand pounds. Kilimanjaro is not a one-off impulse. It is the next and largest move in a multi-year personal effort that keeps escalating.
The money runs through a single JustGiving page and nothing else. When checked it sat at a small fraction of the goal from two dozen donors, with the climb still nearly three months away. There is no aggregator, no product line, and no title sponsor padding the total. Connor covers the expedition costs himself and says so plainly on the page, so a donor knows their money reaches the charity rather than subsidising the trip. The whole operation is one man, one page, one mountain.
The beneficiary is a grassroots men's mental-health charity led by people with lived experience, built around peer-to-peer support rather than clinical infrastructure. That choice matters. Connor could have routed a Kilimanjaro climb to a large national name with its own marketing machine. He chose a small charity whose awareness work he rates, and he is doing it without press, without a sponsor, and without a support team of his own. The gap between the scale of the mountain and the size of the fundraiser is wide, and the build-up is live right now.
In Their Words
“Just over three months until my challenge, raising money for Men And Their Emotions in the name of my best mate.”
