How this man’s grief motivated him to launch a platform that now inspires millions worldwide
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IDAHO FALLS — When his mother passed away, Colin Balfe knew he wanted to do something to honor her life. What he didn’t know was how big his project would get.
Balfe is the founder of Love What Matters, a website that shares real stories by real people about love, compassion, kindness, and overcoming. It has nearly eight million followers on Facebook and tens of millions of people around the world have read its content.
“Our mother had ovarian cancer and breast cancer. She beat the breast cancer…but lost her life, ultimately, to ovarian cancer,” Balfe tells EastIdahoNews.com. “During those last couple of months…she would always say to me, ‘I want you to take all the grief that you’re going to feel and let it fuel you. Put it into something and create something beautiful.”
Balfe launched Love What Matters in 2015 from his home in New York City. It was just a Facebook page with a few thousand followers but it didn’t take long before the page was growing by 50,000 new people a day. Soon came a website, newsletter, book, YouTube channel and podcast.
Love What Matters focuses on uplifting content about adoption, mental health, infertility, addiction, grief, special needs parenting, LGBTQ issues and everyday heroes making a difference. Balfe says he is particularly proud of the communities within Love What Matters, including underserved people connecting around mutual challenges and dreams.
“When you really take a step back and look at some of these stories, they’re just honest. It’s raw, it’s real, it’s authentic,” Balfe explains. “They’re not all good news, but they end on an ‘overcoming something’ note, which is good news.”
Readers can submit their experiences to Love What Matters. Balfe also has a small team of writers who search for stories that fit the platform’s goals. They want readers to relate to the content and, as Balfe explains, feel that “if it’s cathartic for me to read it, and if I’m going through the same thing, I can take comfort in that.”
One of the most-read stories on Love That Matters is about a woman who became a mother to two newborn babies only four months apart. It’s been shared over 1.3 million times on Facebook.
Another story, included on Chartbeat’s most engaging online stories in 2018, is about a woman whose husband had an energy drink and died of cardiac arrest.
Balfe is continually looking for ways to grow Love What Matters and is amazed at how massive it has become. He hopes he’s making his mother proud.
“Our greatest achievement is truly making our readers smile, laugh, or feel less alone in the world,” he says.
Watch our entire interview with Colin Balfe in the video player above.