There's a moment that stays with you. You watch someone you care about — a nurse, a paramedic, a cop — come off a double shift, hollow-eyed and running on nothing, and go straight back in again. Not because they have to. Because that's who they are.
The Love Bus was born from one of those moments — a mirror held up to every first responder, every emergency worker, every person in our community who carries other people's worst days home in their chest and never says a word about it.
David Solkowski — founder of Take 5 Media and the driving force behind STR8ON4U — looked at that grief and made a decision. Not a policy. Not a program. A decision. That the people who show up for everyone else deserve a day when someone shows up for them.
"These are the people who run toward the thing everyone else is running from. When's the last time someone asked them how they're doing?"
— David Solkowski, Take 5 Media
The people the Love Bus is for — our nurses, our heroes.
This Sunday, June 15, 2026 — that day arrives. Thirty-three first responders from across the Northern Rivers will board a luxury coach in Ballina for a day that asks nothing of them except that they show up and let someone else do the looking after.
Doctors, nurses, paramedics, community health workers — people who have given years of their lives to this region. Dr. Christopher Ticker and his community health team. The crews from Fletcher Street Cottage Byron Bay. Staff from Murwillumbah Hospital and Lismore Base Hospital. Rise Real Estate's Braden Walters, who didn't hesitate for a second when he heard what this day was about.
No agenda. No keynote. No ask. Just the coast, the company, and the quiet radical act of being cared for.
The ceremonial song — Catherine Ashcroft and Maurice Dickson's ancient Irish air Táimse im' Chodladh / King of the Pipers — will play as the bus departs each stop. A piece of music so old and so beautiful it needs no explanation. It simply says: you matter.
