Leadership begins with youth and young adults. This is a foundational truth for Active Minds – our organization runs on the advocacy built by youth and young adults. Whether through chapters, run/walk clubs, webinars, the institute, and more.
To kick off Mental Health Awareness Month, five young leaders attended Capitol Hill championing the necessity of federally backed mental health support for youth and young adults led by youth and young adults to legislators.
On May 5, Ayaan Moledina, Amy Senkerik, Naomi Hines, Michael Landu, and Carson Domey sat on a panel together in the Rayburn Building sharing their experiences in advocacy to House of Representative staffers and legislators. They spoke out in support of the Campus Lifeline Act, an Active Minds-authored bill dedicated to strengthening mental health support on college campuses across America through the expansion of mental health crisis resources by including the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline on newly-issued student ID cards alongside increased federal investment in youth-informed mental health strategies.
Panelists
17-year old Ayaan Moledina running for school board in his home county of Rock Round in Texas and director of SEAT, Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, shared his lived experiences with mental health as he passionately spoke to the expansion of suicide prevention efforts.
“You can’t make effective mental health policy for young people without young people… Students are the ones closest to the problem,” Moledina said during the panel as he shared his story of being diagnosed with depression at age 10 and his trajectory into organizing grassroots efforts dedicated to education and mental health competency.
Carson Domey, a Massachusetts native, said that his medical challenges “prepared him for the real chapter of [his] advocacy in mental health.” Since 12 he has advocated for the accessibility of telehealth care and found his passion for mental health advocacy after the loss of a friend to suicide in 2018. This led to his efforts in redefining physical education standards to include mental health and spreading awareness of the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
As CEO and founder of the Acts of Kindness Project, Naomi Hines seeks to uplift underserved communities. The soon to be graduate of Bowie State University is a certified mental health first aid provider with the ambition of becoming a pediatric speech language pathologist.
“Why suffer alone when you have these resources around you? But we need to figure out a way to connect students to that and make students feel more comfortable even utilizing a big resource like that,” Hines said about the need for resource expansion and the necessity of destigmatizing mental health.
Miachael Landu is a devoted advocate to mental health resource accessibility and passionate about destigmatizing the use of psychiatric prescriptions to be treated with the same acceptance as medications for high blood pressure. His advocacy stems from his personal journey with mental health and diagnosis with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD).
“We all have the potential to inspire each other, I am really inspired by 988,” said Landu. “988 would have been a really helpful resource for me back when I didn’t know it existed.”
Amy Senkerik is inspired by the loss of her best friend who died by suicide to ensure no student goes without access to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. “When we make help easier to find we give people a better chance…Putting 988 on student IDs isn’t a complicated solution.”
She is an undergraduate student at Arizona State University, the largest public university in the country, where she successfully advocated for the addition of the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline to be included on digital student IDs.
“They don’t have to google anything, they don’t have to remember where to look, the option is right in front of them. Clear, immediate, and accessible,” she said in reference to the importance of accessibility to the lifeline in a time of crisis.
Campus Lifeline Act
Get involved now by supporting the Campus Lifeline Act! Reach out to your representative to show your support, it takes less than 3 minutes to click the link and urge your member of Congress to support this bipartisan bill that aims to expand access to campus mental health resources, and increase visibility of the 988 Lifeline among young adults.
Youth and young adults deserve a seat at the table when it comes to policymaking because no one knows better what young people need than themselves. Policy should reflect who it is created for. These panelists are an exemplary model of the necessity of youth and young adult perspectives when it comes to making policy for youth and young adults.
