Peer to Peer: Empowering Rural Youth Mental Health Educators & Advocates

This presentation will describe the evolution and iterative adaptation of a 15-year youth-led mental health initiative (Peer to Peer/P2P) to better serve a rural community, including methods for building inclusive community-based programming, strategies for working with rural youth, and ways to empower them to become mental health educators and advocates. Attendees will hear from the project manager of the P2P program as well as a district ISD staff member who spearheaded the program launch in every school in their county. They will also discuss how the collaboration has led to great success of the program's implementation while providing supporting data. For those interested, we can discuss how you can bring this program to your community. This workshop will include an interactive portion where participants will be guided in the brief creation of a mental health awareness campaign and be involved in small group discussions around focus group and evaluation themes. Learning objectives: 1. Audience will be able to summarize the components of an effective youth-led mental health awareness campaign. 2. Audience will be able to describe the unique characteristics of rural schools and strategies for working with them. 3. Attendees will learn effective ways of developing a university-school partnership.