Ideas for Adolescent Behavioral & Mental Health
Ideas
Here are some examples of how your Rotary Club might take action.
Educate the Club Membership
As an introduction to stimulating ideas within your club invite speaker/s to educate your membership on the problems and challenges. It is an unfortunate fact that San Diego has one of the highest levels of teen suicide in the country. We live in a beautiful city, why do our youth lose hope?
One of the many successes of the District 5340 focus on Human Trafficking was providing training to school teachers and counsellors on how to recognize the problem. So, we can start by educating ourselves on Adolescent Behavioral Health.
Click here to find suitable speakers.
Identify Service Providers
Create an inventory of service providers within your community that have a track record with programs addressing Adolescent Behavioral and Mental Health.
Reach out to those providers to ask how your Club could help. Yes, they need $$$’s, but there are likely to be other service projects where you can help to raise awareness of the problem.
District 5340 will develop a list of such service providers. Some examples are:
- Rady Children’s Hospital – Behavioral Health Services
- Vista Hill
- National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), San Diego
- San Diego County Suicide Prevention Council
- Community Health Improvement Partners
Click here to see a list of service providers.
Help to Deploy ACE Screening
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are potentially traumatic events that occur when we are young. ACEs and the associated toxic stress they create are the root causes of some of the most common, serious, and costly health and social challenges facing our state.
The purpose of a complete ACE screening is to rapidly identify which patients are at highest risk for toxic stress and perform the next steps of a more complete, individualized assessment for each of them.
Rotary can help to provide resources to deploy ACE screening to more service providers in our communities.
You will hear more about how your Club can help in this area in the coming months.
Working with Interact Clubs
As District 5340 works to grow the number of Interact Clubs in our high schools, we can work with Interact to understand how we might help in their school.
For example, the school may already have clubs focused on Mental Wellness, or NAMI. Even if there is not an Interact Club at that school your Rotary Club could reach out to see how to partner with existing clubs at the school. And… this could be a great door-opener to create an Interact Club!
Peace Poles
District 5340 will be working with schools and communities to deploy Peace Poles.
NAMIWalks
Join the SD Chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness for the fundraising 5k walk. In April 2022 this was held at NTC Park, Liberty Station. They had over 1,130 participants and raised more than $180,000.
The next walk is on Saturday, April 29, 2023.
Your Club could form a team. Perhaps you could help in the organization and setup of the event. More details at https://namisandiego.org/