Tomorrow (December 13) students participating in Project Mental Wellness at Mitford School will show the world their creative projects and concepts.

While Josh Clarke, Facilitator, is no stranger to making good in the community, a presentation of his Project Accessibility is what got the ball rolling for his latest 'Make Good in the Neighbourhood' venture. 

An information session hosted by Family Community Support Services connected Clarke with Ginger McManus, Child Development Advisor (CDA) at Mitford School and the two quickly got to work on a tough-to-tackle project. "We got brainstorming on what sort of type of project theme would be suitable for kids and so we thought 'what's the biggest challenge facing kids right now?'"

Agreeing that mental health is one of the biggest challenges facing youth right now, the two decided to invite students to collaborate and participate in the special in-school project. "We thought why don't we invite students in to apply their creativity and empathy towards this challenge and so we formed an ambitious project, Project Mental Wellness."

With mental health often being an abstract, difficult and scary topic to discuss; Clarke, McManus, and sixteen students from grades 7/8, embarked on a 12-week journey that would blow the topic open and use creative thinking skills to help remove the stigma. "We invited all the students in, to go through this design thinking process; so kids building an understanding of their own on what mental health means, what does mental illness mean versus mental wellness, and how we view each other."

Going through a discovery phase which included exercises, experiments, and discussions, including those with residents from Bethany Care, the group of students came up with ideas, concepts, and ultimately their specific projects they will share with the school community tomorrow. "It has been really interesting and a learning process, and that is what I think is really cool about working with students and doing these projects is that we're on this journey together. I don't have all the answers, I don't know what they're going to build, how they're going to interact these ideas, and they have organically come up with these projects on their own."

Creating confidence in the students to use their creative skills, empathy of others, talents, interests, and ideas to take on the real-world topic required Clarke to teach students that there is no such thing as a bad idea. "Design is a messy process; you have to weed through a lot of information, trial a lot of ideas, and experience failures along the way but that is the whole part of learning but then, in the end, you end up creating something that is meaningful, impactful and actually useful."

Keeping the 'who they are trying to help' at the centre of their project, students were tasked with how to improve mental wellness in school, at home, and throughout the greater community. "We had three teams tackling each of those and within those teams, there is probably a multitude of projects. We have one team tackling the community component and they have decided to create a podcast. We have another team that is rebooting the Reboot Room which is a mental health space in the school and we have had a newspaper come out of it and some students designed and built a mindful station. Another team is designing a socialization event for Bethany Care seniors who will come here play Bingo, trivia games, have food and snacks, and we'll award some prizes at the end."

With tomorrow being the last day of the session, students are showcasing and launching their concepts and projects to the school community between 12:30 and 2:30 in the afternoon. 

While Clarke states his take away experience from the human-centered, design program has been incredible, some of his students share similar thoughts. Grade seven students Lina Maru and Jessa Davies may have envisioned the program one way but soon realized the project offered so much more. Davies shares mental health and wellness is definitely a topic that concerns many students, including herself. "I have a lot of anxiety, and I even went to the doctor once because I just had such high anxiety one day and all I wanted to do was stay home because it was so overwhelming."

Clarke says once students learned that mental health is a normalized part of everyone's life, the dialogue changed. "We have to remove the stigma and add the supports; 'like how do we find the people we can talk to and trust, take care of ourselves while encouraging others to do the same?!'" Maru, adds so many students end up bottling their emotions or disguising their feelings, mostly due to fear. "Once you talk to somebody it becomes real; when you are by yourself it is not real it is just thoughts."

For students, such as Maru, to learn that utilizing individual creativity, tapping into connections, and using their own supports to take action and tackle a problem or challenge, is a real success. "I feel with Make Good, although not all the projects are released, this topic will be more known to the school because people will talk about it and know stuff about it, for example, through like the newspaper. I think mental wellness will become a topic now because right now it isn't."

 We will showcase the students' designs and incredible projects in a follow-up story and video, after tomorrow's grand reveal.