Progress 09/01/24 to 08/31/25
Outputs
Target Audience:The target audience for this project is and will continue to be teens in the community and surrounding rural areas. Stress of being a current young person has led to increases in mental health issues, substance abuse, and suicide among that age group. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?In addition to attending the annual CYFAR PDE meeting, the entire staff went through trauma-informed care training as listed in the grant. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?The programming and recruitment are disseminated through the college's website, local newspapers, and social media. We are excited that we have been able to work with the college's advancement office to create our own Facebook page specifically for CYFAR programming. This has also allowed us to work towards developing weekly messaging to teens that we are calling "mental health Mondays," and "wellness Wednesdays". Our Mental Health Teen Ambassador is also developing an Instagram page that will allow us to contact teens. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?Building on the success of our second year, the 2025-2026 plan focuses on deepening impact, fostering sustainability, and expanding youth leadership. The centerpiece of our upcoming year will be the Fall 2025 Youth Summit--a youth-designed, youth-led event that brings together teens to explore mental wellness, leadership, and healing. This summit will be a culmination of our monthly youth programming, during which teens will continue to organize their own activities and practice skills learned through our core curricula. The summit will feature workshops, breakout sessions, healing spaces, and teachings that promote connection, resilience, and purpose. Our planning committee includes representatives from UW-Madison, Boys and Girls Club, and Northeast Wisconsin Community Action Program. In tandem, we will continue our successful after-school programming twice a week, targeting middle and high school students. These sessions will emphasize academic support, emotional wellness, life skills, and peer mentorship. Our collaborative work with the local school district ensures alignment with educational priorities and maximizes student engagement. Our Teen Mental Health First Aid training, which was delayed due to a partner cancellation, will be relaunched through a new collaboration with UW-Extension. We will also expand our peer mentoring model, giving older teens the opportunity to mentor younger participants and deepen their own leadership roles.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
We are continuing to strive to meet the goals of the grant to provide resources and tools specifically for youth to help them cope with daily stressors of mental health, which leads to substance abuse and higher rates of suicide. The college and the community have dedicated youth service providers, and this grant was established to build capacity within the community to provide the tools to combat these problems that continue to plague young people. Our community partner for the grant is the Woodland Boys and Girls Club, located in Neopit, WI. Additionally, we have a number of young people in the community who have helped us to design the program, which provides buy-in to ensure involvement. They have been able to provide us with insight as to what they felt the biggest needs are and the challenges that young people are facing in the community and rural areas. The curriculum our youth service providers are utilizing is Teen Mental Health First Aid, Discovery Dating, and Trauma-Informed Care.We are still working to obtain our Teen Mental Health Certifications, as we have previously completed Youth Mental Health First Aid. This program gives young people tools and resources that will allow them to help their friends and family who might be dealing with substance abuse, mental health issues, or thoughts of suicide. This was again based on what the youth in the community have asked for, so they can also make a difference. Additionally, we were able to offer the Discovery Dating train-the-trainer for providers.This is not strictly about dating per se, but helps young people explore and clarify personal goals and values, and practice positive decision-making and healthy relationships. Staff participated in World Mental Health Awareness Day on October 10th by going to the schools and handing out ribbons for students to wear to show their support, as well as stickers with positive affirmations that they placed on their phones and backpacks. We have continued to work with and collaborate with the Menominee High School, which allowed us to come directly into the school for programming after school. The Boys and Girls Club hired a Teen Director to oversee their sub-award as our Neopit community site, and she has worked directly with our Youth Program Coordinator. We were also able to again bring on a young teen to the program who was instrumental in providing input into the initial writing of the grant. She is an amazing role model for the teens that she is working with. We saw this as a unique addition to the program that provided us with a direct line to teens and the needs of teens. In April, 5 teens from our Neopit site were able to attend the Mental Wellness Student Leadership Summit 2025, to learn about health-related topics, hear student panels, and visit the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. We were able to acknowledge May as Mental Health Awareness Month by holding an entire week of activities, May 19- 23rd. This included wearing green to recognize mental health awareness, a game called roll the dice, and say something nice, a "gratitude" graffiti wall, a brain break booth, and the opportunity to color your way to calm all at the high school. A planning team was established in November to coordinate the first-ever Teen Mental Health Summit, entitled "Pathways to Resilience". This will be a two-day event on September 18 and 19th and will include keynote speakers, hands-on workshops, and breakout sessions, tools for stress management, emotional well-being, and self-empowerment. We have been and will continue to recruit statewide for this event.Staff were able to attend the annual Professional Development Event held in Louisville in June. Moving into the summer, we are now working with 15 teens who have indicated a strong interest in being able to build their mental health skills and have been regular participants at the school while we were doing programming.
Publications
|
Progress 09/01/23 to 08/31/24
Outputs
Target Audience:The target audience for this project is and will continue to be Indigenous teens in the community and surrounding communities. Historical trauma and the stress of being a current young person have led to increases in mental health issues, substance abuse, and suicide among that age group. Changes/Problems:We were able to add our teen ambassador. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?In January, twenty staff and service providers participated in Teen Mental Health First Aide. This was provided by the UW-Division of Extension, our program partner. We again provided program training in March. The Wise Women Group trained staff and service providers in Discovery Dating. This is a program that helps teens make positive decisions. In April, our Youth Project Coordinator traveled to Madison with two teens to participate in the Mental Wellness Student Youth Leadership Summit. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?The programming and recruitment are disseminated through the college's website, local tribal news, and social media. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?We will continue to strive to meet the needs of teens in the community both from a mental health standpoint as well as working to become successful citizens within the community. Some programming has started in year one and we are looking to expand programming in year two. This will occur in both communities. We also want to make sure we are sharing our successes with the community, partners, and funder through appropriate evaluation. We will continue to follow the goals and objectives as indicated in the original proposal.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
The College of Menominee Nation Department of Continuing Education has been able to continue building its relationship with the community and its partners. We started the project with informational events where we were able to educate the community about CYFAR and the Building Menominee Teen Resilience project. The first was the annual Woodland Boys and Girls Club Pow-wow at the local Family and Community Engagement Center. Staff worked with local youth Students Against Destructive Decisions (SADD) trying to coordinate upcoming events within the community and the local school district. This was a result of the school district losing its SADD chapter advisor. The college's staff worked with the school district to ensure resources and opportunities for the group were not lost. An additional partner that we have made a strong connection with is the Native American Center for Health Professionals (NACHP) at the University of Wisconsin Hospital. They are very committed to improving both physical and mental health in Tribal communities. In November, the two community sites were able to travel down to Madison and tour the School of Medicine and participate in an Indigenous student panel on resources that are available for careers and programming. This also helped to build on our relationship and the CYFAR team continues to participate in monthly meetings with NACHP. The new year brought kickoff events in both the Neopit and Keshena communities to recruit and promote the Building Menominee Teen Resilience project. We were able to bring in motivational speakers who are Native and experience mental health generational trauma and how it impacted their lives. In Neopit, we brought in an x-professional basketball player who is from a Tribe in Wisconsin. Who talked about growing up on the Reservation and how basketball was his positive outlet. In Keshena, we were able to bring in a Native rapper who provided music that delivered messages to the audience including making smart decisions and taking care of yourself both mentally and physically. The highlight of this event was a Native American hand drum contest for the youth with the artist performing with them. At each event, we also had safe and fun hands-on activities such asart therapy, self-care stations, mocassin making, healthy traditional foods, and basketball drills. For each motivational speaker, we were able to partner with NACHP and the Wisconsin Department of Vocational Rehabilitation sharing the cost of each. In February, we held parent information meetings for the participants who we recruited during the kickoff event. This took place at both sites and allowed us to share the objectives of the grant as well as handouts on the curriculum we would be using for programming. Parents and the youth provided feedback on what else they would like to see come out of this project. They were able to ask questions to get a better understanding of the grant and the community sites. We were also very excited to announce the addition of a recently graduated Native teen from the Menominee Indian School District, who came on board during the planning year in Marchas the Teen Mental Health Ambassador. We were able to draw from her experiences and bounce ideas off of her as well as have her come up with ideas for possible programming that she felt would better connect with young people. This worked out even better than we had proposed and she was able to connect with her peers and us as service providers to try and bridge the gap of what was needed to create meaningful mental health and resilience opportunities for those who most needed it. We were able to bring her to the Annual CYFAR Professional Development Event in Minneapolis. She was very interested in all of the work that is happening throughout the country to help young people become healthier and more successful. She has moved on to attend school at the University of Wisconsin Madison. We are in the process of filling this teenambassador position as we have seen the benefit of hearing young people's voices directly. April, we partnered again with NACHP on theirIndigenous Health and Wellness Conference held in Madison. Thisbrought together young Natives from throughout the state to meet and learn about wellness and non-Western techniques for dealing with stress and depression. They were also able to learn about careers in the medical field and listened to another Native motivational speaker who has become a successful young actor in spite of her handicap. This three-day conference ended with a powwow providing a safe and healthy environment to again celebrate the Native culture. In May, we brought all of the students who were interested in the program to both the Neopit and Keshena community sites and administered a pre-test of common measures for resilience. Sixteen youths completed this common measure. We were also able to conduct an adult survey and a community event and recorded twenty adults who took the adult common measure for resilience.
Publications
|