One aspect community members don’t always know about Communities for Youth Blaine County is that it works collaboratively with local partners to prevent and address youth mental health. One entity that we collaborate and coordinate with very closely is the Blaine County Mental Well-Being Initiative. We highlight key areas of coordination between Communities for Youth Blaine County and the Blaine County Mental Well-Being Initiative below to help further understanding of how these entities are working together to make positive change in our community.
The Blaine County Mental Well-Being Initiative (MWBI) was created to collaborate on comprehensive solutions to mental health and substance use in the community across a person’s lifespan (“cradle to the grave” as Mental Well-Being Initiative Coordinator Jenna Vagias likes to say). The Mental Well-Being Initiative’s comprehensive approach (that means mental health and substance use prevention, intervention, treatment, recovery and access to care) and life course perspective are important pieces in creating systems and environments that aren’t siloed and work best for our community. In order to ensure that the specific needs and strengths of a group don’t get missed or downplayed, a partnership between the Mental Well-Being Initiative and Communities for Youth Blaine County becomes so important.
Because the Communities for Youth initiative encourages data-driven upstream prevention for young people, the Mental Well-Being Initiative can rely on Communities for Youth survey data, partnerships, and community engagement. These aspects provide a means to ensure that youth mental health is a major focus of the work and that upstream prevention efforts are based on local youth data and the evidence on what works in prevention.
If you have been following along with some of the updates the Mental Well-Being Initiative has put out recently, you can see clear evidence of how MWBI and Communities for Youth are working together. Last winter, both initiatives hosted meetings with local community members (including youth!) to create goals around preventing and addressing mental health and substance use. Those meetings culminated in the creation of a Community Engagement Session Comments document as well as Community-wide Goals and Objectives published by the Mental Well-Being Initiative. For those who have been engaging in the Communities for Youth process, the goals around increasing social connection and prioritizing education around risk and protective factors (e.g., sleep) related to mental health should come as no surprise. Youth social connection and increased sleep for teens are the two areas that community members discussed and voted on as areas in need of attention.
This is just one example of the ways we are utilizing local strengths and assets and connecting the dots to address youth mental health. We know there will be more collaboration opportunities in the future and look forward to our continued partnership with the Blaine County Youth Mental Well-Being Initiative.
Want to learn more or get involved?
Communities for Youth Community Contact: Sarah Seppa, seppas@slhs.org
Blaine County Mental Well-Being Initiative Coordinator: Jenna Vagias, jenna@5bmentalwellbeing.org
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