The Community Action Partnership of San Luis Obispo (CAPSLO) is making a bigger push to increase the awareness of youth mental health with a program that utilizes students as mental health ambassadors at their own schools.
“Really at the heart of this project too is kind of reducing that stigma around mental health," CAPSLO Teen Wellness Program Manager Jenna Lawrence explained.
Last school year, CAPSLO partnered with high schools in Santa Maria to utilize youth mental health ambassadors in their schools. At first, they only had 22 kids and a $15,000 grant from the California State Department of Public Health.
“Just learned a lot from that experience working with those original youth mental health ambassadors, and then from there, just having requests from the wellness centers and from teachers asking if we're going to keep this project going,” Lawrence said.
“We got some ideas of what the students were needing at the school sites and getting the student perspective was an important part of it," Santa Maria Joint Union High School District's Director of Student Wellness Jose Pereyra added.
After taking in all the information, the State Department of Public Health awarded CAPSLO a $966,365 grant to help fund youth mental health ambassadors across northern Santa Barbara County and San Luis Obispo County over a 27-month period.
Students will be paid for being ambassadors with other portions of the grant going to help CAPSLO campaign for more ambassadors as well as continue to spread awareness through digital channels about the stigmas associated with mental health.
“We can get conversations started around mental health to get a lot of these students recruited and just start to develop this campaign,” Lawrence stated.
With a new school year comes new opportunities and with the campaign for more ambassadors underway, the goal is to use that peer-to-peer support in all of the high schools and their wellness centers to better diagnose the problems that permeate these kids.
“Peer-to-peer is always a way for students to connect with one another and they're going through the same experiences at the same time,” Pereyra said.
The application to apply as a youth mental health ambassador is September 15. For more information on how to apply, visit capslo.org.
