Episode Description:

If you have a teenager in your life and you’ve felt them pull away from conversations you used to have easily, this episode is for you.

Kathy Saulitis has spent three years going through what young people write and create when nobody is grading it: the poems, drawings, essays, and songs submitted to #CreateConnectCare, a youth mental health initiative that collected over 3,000 submissions this year from young people in all 50 states and 15 countries. She’s seen the repeating themes. She has also thought a lot about what parents can actually do, and she’s direct about it. Lilly Kacziba is 17, from Queens, New York, one of fewer than 20 teenagers chosen this year for the program’s National Mental Health Youth Council. She explains, from her own experience, why teenagers go quiet and shut down… and it’s not because they don’t want to talk.

We are honored to release this Guest Interview on the eve of World Mental Health Day.

Kathy Saulitis

• Senior Advisor to the CEO, Chief of Staff & Marketing Lead, Creative Visions
• Director, #CreateConnectCare
• Creative Visions is a Malibu-based nonprofit and United Nations NGO, founded over 25 years ago by Kathy Eldon and Amy Eldon in honor of Dan Eldon, a Reuters photojournalist killed in Somalia in 1993. The organization supports creative activists working across documentary, music, poetry, advocacy, and youth change-making.
• Website: createconnectcare.org
• Instagram: @CreateConnectCare

Lilly Kacziba

• Student, Archbishop Molloy High School, Queens, New York (class of 2027)
• National Mental Health Youth Council, #CreateConnectCare (2026 cohort)
• One of fewer than 20 teenagers selected nationally; the only representative from New York.
• Since December 2025, Lilly has run seven peer mental health workshops at her school (three in-person, four online), open to any student at any skill level.

  GET INVOLVED WITH #CREATECONNECTCARE

Website: createconnectcare.org

• Browse the full gallery and this year’s award-winning work
• Read the poem “No Es Ilegal” and watch the dance performance for the Behind the Mask project
• Download the Teen Mental Wellness Day activity guide (March 2nd) — the program’s most-downloaded resource, written by youth council members
• Find classroom resources and suggested projects for educators

For young people (ages 11–18):

• Try the Behind the Mask project anytime: one side shows what you let others see, the other shows what you keep hidden. Save it for the submission window.
• Submission portal opens: January 5, 2027
• Submission portal closes: March 31, 2027
• Awards announced in May, before end of school year

Coming May 2027:

• Stressolescence — a PBS documentary about stress and adolescence, featuring #CreateConnectCare and former youth council member Ryan.

  MUSIC CREDITS

This episode features two original songs submitted to the 2026 #CreateConnectCare challenge:

• “Grow” — written and performed by Rayn S.
• “Worn” — written and performed by Merissa M.
• Both are award-winning submissions. The full gallery is at createconnectcare.org.

 CRISIS RESOURCES

In the United States:

• 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: call or text 988 (free, 24/7, English and Spanish)
• Crisis Text Line: text HOME to 741741 (free, 24/7)

International:

• findahelpline.com — directory of crisis lines in countries around the world
• befrienders.org — emotional support centers in more than 50 countries
• If someone is in immediate danger, call local emergency services.

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Theme and all other original music by Marvin Lanes

Transcript:

Kathy: 

We wanted to do all 50 states, and we were missing one state. We were missing Wyoming. And so I’m a little badger. I’m like, “I need that state.” So I got in touch with the Boys & Girls Club in Wyoming. Facilitator said, “You will have a submission by tomorrow morning.” When I woke up, there was no submission, and I was like, “Oh, no.”

I got in touch with her, and what had happened is this young girl came in who was around 12 years old. She was writing her creative expression, her essay. When they read it, it was really dark, things that they never knew about her. And so she said, “We can’t submit it, but what we are doing is sending in a team of counselors this afternoon to help her.”

And I said, “That is exactly what our program is about.”

Arielle (Narrator): 

Meet Kathy. She’s an advisor at Creative Visions, a Malibu-based nonprofit and United Nations NGO, and the person who built and runs #CreateConnectCare, a youth mental health initiative that uses creative expression to reach young people ages 11 to 18 across the United States and around the world. In 2026, the program collected over 3,000 submissions, drawings, poems, songs, performances, videos, essays, from young people in all 50 states and 15 countries.

We’re featuring a couple award-winning songs today, so check the show notes for their details. #CreateConnectCare is all about giving young people a safe space for the young person creating art to express and make sense of everything they are going through. Growing up in general is hard, and to be growing up now in the era of AI, climate disasters, and just so much information about everything literally at our fingertips, it adds layers that a lot of us who grew up in earlier generations probably will never fully understand.

This episode is about what happens when young people are given a safe place to say what’s on their minds and hearts, and about what that looks like from two very different perspectives. First, from Kathy, who built the program, and then from a teenager currently living inside it. 

Lilly: 

Um, hi, I’m Lilly. I go to Archbishop Molloy High School in New York City.

Arielle (Narrator): 

Lilly was selected for the National Mental Health Youth Council of #CreateConnectCare this year, 2026, and has been running peer workshops at her school since December. We’ll hear more about what that youth council is in just a bit. Today, we present to you a conversation across generations about what young people are dealing with and how they are helping each other navigate the beautiful messiness of growing up.

I’m Arielle, and in honor of World Mental Health Day, which takes place tomorrow, Saturday, October 10th, we at the Optimist Daily’s weekly roundup are proud to share with all you optimists the remarkable work and impact of #CreateConnectCare. All right. Let’s begin with just your introduction. Tell me who you are, what Creative Visions does, and where #CreateConnectCare blends into all of that.

Kathy: 

My name’s Kathy Saulitis. I wear many hats at Creative Visions. I’m senior advisor to the CEO. I lead our marketing team. The chief of staff. And I also lead the #CreateConnectCare program. We’re a small nonprofit. We use the arts, media, and technology for social impact storytelling and support a variety of causes.

#CreateConnectCare sits in our youth and educator programs division. 

Arielle: 

For those of us who don’t have the context regarding Creative Visions and its difference to #CreateConnectCare, could you kind of explain how it all fits in? 

Kathy: So Creative Visions is over 25 years old. It was founded by Kathy Eldon and her daughter, Amy, after they lost Dan, her son and, and Amy’s brother.

He was a Reuters photojournalist in Somalia, and there was an incident where he and his team, there was a misunderstanding, and they were stoned to death. He used his creativity for social good and social impact, and so Kathy and Amy started Creative Visions. We support creators of all types, documentarians, musicians, poets.

We call them creative activists. And then we also have our youth creative change-makers, and those are young people who wanna use creativity to support a variety of causes across any social issue. #CreateConnectCare was started because in May of 2023, I heard Dr. Vivek Murthy, who was then the surgeon general for the United States, speak about the youth mental health crisis that we were in, particularly focusing on social media and isolation that came with the pandemic.

So I asked my CEO if we could do something because I knew that creativity was really good for your mental health. So she said, “Sure. Let’s try this.” 

Arielle (Narrator): 

Obviously, Kathy is an incredibly empathetic person who saw the need for #CreateConnectCare to exist and went for it, but its origin story is actually quite personal 

Kathy: 

When my daughter was in high school, I remember her coming home and talking about a party that she hadn’t been invited to.

She could see all the photos on Facebook of people laughing and people smiling, and who was there, down to every single person. And I thought, “Wow.” Like, when I was in high school, you heard about it on Monday, it was out of your mind by Tuesday. But this was like a living, ongoing thing where young people have to see and compare themselves and feel excluded.

I thought, “I just don’t want our world to be that way.” And so we started #CreateConnectCare to really reach out to young people so that they don’t feel isolated 

Arielle: 

#CreateConnectCare’s pilot year was 2023, and back then there was still a lot to figure out … you didn’t know how exactly they were gonna come together yet?

Kathy: 

Yes. First we kind of really wanted to ground it in the research. There’s research that says there’s thousands of thoughts that go through your mind a day, but when you create, it slows that down. You get into kind of a flow state, and it helps with your stress and anxiety. We really wanted #CreateConnectCare to be by youth, for youth.

We felt it was really important for youth voice to be center stage in this program because it is what they are experiencing. So we partnered with an organization called InnerView. They work with high school and college young people across the United States. It’s an app where you can do volunteer work, you can share your advocacy.

You end up having a digital resume that you can use for college or jobs. We had a wonderful response from young people through InnerView. Then we decided now we have to create a youth advisory council to really help us to shepherd in the next stage, which was the first #CreateConnectCare challenge, which was in 2024.

Arielle: 

The growth from when you started to this year, 2026, I know that there’s been… What is it, like 3,000 submissions? Over 3,000. 50 states. 

Kathy: 

Yeah. 

Arielle: 

Over 3,000. The whole country’s involved, and then there’s 15 countries in total. Looking at these numbers now, what does that feel like from, from where you’re sitting?

Kathy: 

It feels wonderful, and it feels like we have a ways to go to reach more young people. It’s interesting. We just did a video, and actually Daniel Turtletaub, who’s Kathy Eldon’s grandson, was our voiceover in the video because we truly wanna keep this youth driven. And there was a line in there that says, “#CreateConnectCare gives young people a place to breathe.”

There are so many young people across the country and the world that need a place to breathe. 

Arielle (Narrator): 

A poignant example of this is a snippet we heard at the very beginning of the episode when Kathy described the creative essay that the 12-year-old girl from Wyoming submitted to her Boys & Girls Club, and how through writing a submission for #CreateConnectCare she was able to get help 

Kathy: 

And so she said, “We can’t submit it. But, what we are doing is sending in a team of counselors this afternoon to help her, and I said, “That is exactly what our program is about.”

She was able to share her story through her writing that they didn’t even know about. 

Arielle: 

Wow, that’s a really powerful example. Right now there’s a lot of conversation about young people or just people in general turning to AI for emotional support because it kind of creates this similar, like, non-judgmental space with very low or no stakes.

What does a peer-led creative program offer that AI conversations just can’t? 

Kathy: 

Real people that you’re sitting across from. So it’s conversations. When you’re sitting with a group of young people, if you’re creating neurographics or if you’re doing a project, we have several teen-suggested projects on #CreateConnectCare.

What we’ve found from our youth leaders who have told us what happens when they’re with their peers, conversation starts happening, and then you hear that someone is sharing, which gives you really the courage to speak as well because you’re not alone. One of our schools up in Maine, each individual student did their own project.

It was a language arts class. The teacher let them do whatever they wanted to do, film, essays, visual art, et cetera. And they were gonna be sharing in the library all their projects, and a young man said to the teacher, “I’m really not comfortable sharing.” So she said, “Fine, you don’t have to share. That’s okay.”

Toward the end of their presentations, he went up to her and he said, “I’m ready to share.” He had a chronic disease that nobody knew about, and so that really shows you that, you know, it’s the real connection, the feeling vulnerable, the seeing that other people who you may think is, like, the big jock on the football team also has issues that is really important.

Arielle (Narrator): 

Kathy’s insights on what the creative process offers young people is invaluable, especially since she’s had her eyes on all the submissions for three years. She knows the repeating themes and overarching topics that occupy the youth of today from the curator’s side. She’s seen many pieces that have moved her.

Lilly knows how these submissions come to life from a completely different standpoint. She’s a student at Archbishop Molloy High School in Queens, New York, class of 2027. She was selected this year for Creative Visions National Mental Health Youth Council, one of fewer than 20 teenagers chosen nationwide, and the only one from New York.

Her project was to run workshops at her own school, and she’s amazing at what she does. But let’s take a sec to get to know her before we dive into her work. 

Lilly: 

I’m kind of a hobby collector, so I like trying new stuff all the time. I like doing things like learning languages, writing. I like to read a lot. I like to draw, which is what really attracted me to #CreateConnectCare.

Arielle: 

What’s the newest hobby that you’ve picked up? 

Lilly: 

That’s a good question Honestly, okay, so a few years ago, last year actually, I went paddle-boarding for the first time. That’s kind of a hobby that I’ve been really drawn to, but the thing is I don’t have, like, the time really to get to a lake ’cause I live in New York City.

All the lakes are kind of far, but I’m planning on this trip to go paddleboarding again. I feel like it’s freeing to be out on the water. I do snowboarding, so I kind of have the balance feel already, so that’s a hobby I really like. 

Arielle: 

And when you say this trip, that means that you are not- Oh, yeah … in New York City at the moment.

Lilly: 

I’m in Hungary right now. I’m visiting family. I’m gonna be going paddleboarding with some of my little cousins, and it’s always a blast trying to knock each other off the boards. 

Arielle: 

That will definitely help your balance going forward. Mm-hmm. Okay, so you were talking earlier about how you like drawing and painting, doing artsy things, and as you mentioned, that’s how you were originally attracted to #CreateConnectCare.

Could you tell me the story behind that and how you ended up on the National Youth Council? 

Lilly: 

Totally. So I received a personal invitation from InnerView because I’ve done a lot of service in the past, like beach cleanups, working with the local park rangers. I volunteer a lot after school. We have a lot of workshops.

Making cards for the elderly and writing letters to elderly people, which 

I think that’s really nice. 

Because I’ve been so involved with work like this, I received an invitation to be part of the Youth National Council. I read through the description of it, and I really liked its ties to mental health.

Youth mental health is something really valuable to discuss, especially ’cause there’s a lot of stigma around it. I had to fill out an application, and luckily I was able to be part of this meaningful work. 

Arielle: 

Before you got involved in the council, what were you noticing around you at school? What was the atmosphere like?

What were kids going through? 

Lilly: 

Well, I was entering junior year, which is notably renowned as the hardest year of high school. It’s the year that colleges most look at with academics and extracurricular commitments. So I feel like throughout my school and in myself, I noticed a lot of people were getting burnt out, really tired, really anxious.

Many of them were also taking their first AP last year and studying for the SATs. 

There was definitely a lot of difficulty in balancing. Waking up at 6:20, going to school, which might not be that early, but after four hours of sleep ’cause you’re working on an AP Lit project, still having to go to school, having probably four or five tests just lined up back to back, looking at your calendar, counting down the days till the next day off, but you know subconsciously you’re just gonna be doing more work then.

It’s definitely pretty difficult, all the commitments to balance, and not even to mention the extracurriculars. Seeing you have two clubs meetings in one day, you have to figure out how to go to both, but then you’re gonna miss parts of them. It’s really a challenging time for a lot of teenagers. They feel a lot of pressure from all of these commitments that they’re part of.

I know I’ve dealt with a lot of stress in the past. For me, things like writing or- Drawing, that’s what helped me to alleviate a lot of that stress. During times of academic pressures, I feel like that’s what really drew me into #CreateConnectCare, because it was kind of that same idea of doing a hobby or something that gets your mind off of everything on your plate.

Arielle: 

We spoke earlier, and you mentioned that you, you love to draw people, faces specifically. What draws you to their faces? 

Lilly: 

It’s just you get to draw a person’s unique story. Like, there’s a lot that you can see from a person’s face. Their eyebrows, if they’re furrowed, if they’re more at ease. You can see into their eyes, and I feel like the eyes really, like, paint a picture of the soul.

Whenever I draw, I have this weird habit where I mimic the face that I’m drawing subconsciously, and then I notice after I’m, like, drawing a- an angry person, and then my mom walks in the room. She’s like, “What’s going on?” I’m like, “Oh, that’s just my face ’cause I’m drawing a person who’s angry.” It really lets me, like, step into another person’s shoes and just get into their mind.

It draws me to that uniqueness that a person has. 

Arielle: 

You centered your project around self-care, and correct me if I’m wrong, but you organized after school sessions, and you made them open to all skill levels, and you deliberately avoided going only to the art club. Once you decided to take this on, what did building it look like and where did you start?

Arielle (Narrator): 

If you are a student or even a teacher who wants to know what it takes to lead a similar workshop wherever you go to school, pay close attention to this part. 

Lilly: 

At first, I did a lot of research into the needs of my community, so that’s where I saw that self-care would be the best option so that people began to prioritize themselves over, like, academics and all the other pressures that they face.

Then came the planning phase. I was emailing different teachers, and I settled on the head of my service department because she usually organized all the InnerView workshops. With her, I planned and I set the dates. We figured out what kind of materials I would need. I chose the basic paper and markers so that anyone could use it. Afterwards came the implementation. I ended up having three workshops that were in person, four that were online. 

I wanted to make it as available to as many people as possible. A lot of clubs meet after school. I didn’t want someone to have the desire to attend the workshop, but not be able to because of a previous commitment.

At the meetings, I basically walked them through what #CreateConnectCare was. I gave them the background on why this is so important for youth mental health, gave them the supplies, told them to create a piece of artwork, something that brings them joy, a sport like basketball, or even doing skincare.

Some students chose the other option, depicting a message related to self-care, something like be yourself, don’t be afraid to grow. They were able to make small doodles like this. It was as accessible to as many people as possible. 

Arielle: 

What was the first turnout like? 

Lilly: 

Luckily, the media team at my school, they interviewed me, and they made an Instagram post, which really helped out a lot to gain more traction.

My first turnout, I think it was probably a room of 30 kids, which was really good. There were a lot of theater kids, different athletes. Like, I remember some people from the softball team had shown up. There was a lot of word of mouth. A lot of my friends, they brought their siblings, their cousins. Those people brought their friends.

It just continued to spread like that. 

Arielle: 

How did the online sessions differ? 

Lilly: 

Honestly, it kind of was its own ecosystem based on who was joining and how comfortable they were with sharing. So some of the meetings were a little bit more quiet, but then other ones, the people on it, they were talking the whole meeting while they were making their drawings.

Also, at the end of some of the meetings, the participants actually asked the others if they wanted to share. So that was great ’cause they were able to share the art that they were doing. So it wasn’t isolated at all. I hadn’t actually carved out time for that, but it just happened organically. It happened naturally by itself.

One of the students just chimed in, “Hey guys, do you guys wanna share?” And I made sure that they knew that they should only share if they feel comfortable. But luckily, everyone felt like it was a good place to openly discuss mental health, which really showed me how there’s a great need for this open discussion about mental health.

I feel like having more outlets for that for teenagers can really make a huge difference. 

Arielle: 

The drawings and the writings and the messages that kept coming through were often about acceptance and just being themselves, which is hard in adolescence. It’s hard in adulthood. Self-love and accepting care and love from other people, those are two different things.

They’re intertwined, but they’re different. Are you seeing both? And what does the difference look like in someone’s work if they’re expressing one or the other? 

Lilly: 

What you were saying with the interplay, I feel like you can’t really love others if you don’t extend that same love to yourself. With the self-love idea, there was a lot of that through the acceptance, because it’s really hard to accept our imperfections and flaws.

Even though we all have them, you’re more critical of yourself than of other people. So I feel like having those ideas of acceptance being placed in the artworks, I feel like that’s where we saw self-love. Loving others, that stems from accepting yourself, and then being willing to extend that same empathy that you have for yourself to other people.

It was good seeing how so many different people from different backgrounds could come together and get to know each other. It was really powerful because of the whole aspect of connection in #CreateConnectCare. Beyond just making artworks, and beyond just showing your care for others and for yourself, I feel like one of the really crucial parts of it is being able to foster these connections with others through the open discussions.

Arielle: 

Speaking of being able to speak openly, it’s one thing to be able to do that with your peers, but then there’s also the difficulty between perhaps teenagers and their parents. When a teenager goes quiet in a conversation with a parent, or, like, just shuts down and stops talking, what do you think is going on for them?

Lilly: 

I don’t think it’s that they don’t wanna talk. Teenagers, they feel a lot of complex emotions, and sometimes it’s the first time that they’re feeling that way. It’s even harder to talk about it with someone else when they can’t fully comprehend what they’re going through themselves. My advice to any parents dealing with this, even though it can be frustrating, you just want the best for your child.

You wanna really get through to them. Sometimes it’s better to take a pause, take a break, give your teenager some space. Let them continue to do the things that they love doing, whether it’s a hobby or a sport, and just be willing to meet them halfway once they are ready to talk about it with you 

Arielle: 

You’ve been doing this since December, right, Lilly?

That’s quite a good chunk of time. What has it given you that nothing else at school or at home could have given you? Has it changed how you see yourself? 

Lilly: 

Honestly, in the past, when I was in middle school and at the start of high school, I was pretty shy person, and I struggled a lot with being my authentic self.

Through these workshops, because I was encouraging so many people to be authentic and to make work that they’re proud of and that they can really see themselves in, that helped to remind me that it’s okay for me to be myself, and that I won’t get judged by doing so. It has also shown me I’m capable of being a leader.

I’ve had a lot of leadership roles in the past, but I’ve never really started something new at my school, and since this was something completely foreign to most of the people in my school, it was something that I really had to introduce and get people to understand since they hadn’t known about it before.

It showed me that I’m capable of starting a new project and really seeing it through to impact as many people as possible. 

Arielle: 

If a teenager listening to this in the middle of, like, a really challenging moment in their life, what would you want them to hear? Not from the program, but just from you. 

Lilly: 

I would want them to know that there are people who genuinely care about them.

I would want them to know that there are people that they can turn to. They’re not ever truly alone because they have their friends, they have their family. They have so many people that they don’t even know who are cheering them on. They always have these people to turn to, even though it might take a lot of time to warm up to it, and it might come with a lot of difficulty.

But from that, they will grow and continue to get better from there. 

Arielle (Narrator): 

My conversation with Lilly was so, so inspiring. I wish we could have fit the whole conversation into this episode because she had a lot of wisdom to offer on topics like managing a busy life and what makes a great leader, but who knows?

Perhaps we will fit that into a future bonus episode at some point. For now, I hope that any listener who is even remotely interested in the benefits of creativity for mental health, no matter the age or stage of life, found some motivation and instruction from this conversation with Lilly. Lilly gives us such a good image of what’s been taking up space in the minds and hearts of young people in her New York high school.

But let’s pivot back to Kathy, who’s privy to the global snapshot of youth mental health, based not only on the artworks themselves, but also in what she reads in the accompanying reflections, an aspect of this program that we haven’t gotten to just yet. 

Kathy: 

There are a lot of things that we’re seeing, like themes that keep coming up, family relationships, that comes through in some of the visual art where you see a young person surrounded by books and trophies and trying to express that they have a lot that they’re dealing with, academic achievement, immigration, climate anxiety, social media.

But they’re also then reflecting on how much they, they feel like if you s- hang in there, things will get better. 

Arielle: 

So beyond the creative work itself, participants write reflections about why They made what they made. Can you tell me why these reflections are so significant? 

Kathy: 

Um, you get a deeper look at what they were thinking when they started the piece, and then what they wanted to accomplish with it is equally as important.

So many say, “I wanna share this with others so that young people in my life know what’s going on and know how to address these things. I wanna connect with others.” Recently, I was speaking to a, a young girl who was one of our awardees. She comes from a very small rural town, and she wrote the poem, “No Es Illegal.”

In her reflection, which actually is to me just as important and sometimes more important than the actual creative piece you see, she talked about how there’s very little diversity in her town, and she really wants to connect with other young people who may have felt the same thing she feels or may understand what she feels better through her poems.

And her teachers were actually the ones who suggested that she submit them to #CreateConnectCare. And then I was talking to another young person who was also an awardee, and she also lives in a very small rural town. She’s African American, and that poem is something she shared with all her friends, she said, “Because it really made me feel a connection, and I wanted them to feel a connection.”

That is a place where we wanna grow. We want more young people to feel that connection so they know it’s okay not to be okay, but that they’ll really have some more hope and resilience 

Arielle (Narrator): 

Resilience is important to instill in youth, but it’s also been an essential part of #CreateConnectCare’s evolution.

#CreateConnectCare has experienced amazing growth in just three years, demonstrating how needed a program like this is for our youth, not just locally, but globally. But that doesn’t mean that progress has always been smooth sailing. Where you were building something that didn’t land quite the way you had hoped?

Kathy: 

There are a couple things. One, we still aren’t reaching as many young men as we would like to reach. All the studies tell you that boys have a harder time sharing their emotions. We tried to add STEM as a medium, thinking maybe we’d get more young men interested in robotics for mental health and- Mm-hmm

and then we also tried to add sports because we’re like, “Okay, is that a place where we can meet them where they are?” But it kind of diluted really what was going on with the program. We dropped sports. We dropped STEM. This year, we really tried to actually look at populations that are within clubs at schools, so like gender and sexuality alliance club, mental health awareness clubs, affinity groups, African American students for X club.

We want to be really inclusive. I think our data shows us this year that we’re growing to that. We want everyone to feel this is a place for them to participate, so we really are looking at certain demographics that we’re trying to get in touch with their national or global organizations so that we can outreach to those populations 

Arielle: 

I remember you saying that there was a former male council member.

Could you tell me a little bit about that? 

Kathy: 

Wow. Yes. Ryan was in our first youth council, youth advisory council, and we didn’t know that he had mental health issues himself. He was amazing at his high school. He got his sports team to wear green ribbons for mental health awareness, and they had a big mental health day at their school.

Fast-forward, Ryan spoke at an assembly in his state to over 500 people with the governor on mental health, and now he’s a sophomore in college, and we just found out from him literally the other day, he changed his major from computer science to mental health. He really wants to share his story about his own experience with mental health.

Also, he really wants to get out there and break the stigma. And he’s also gonna be in a documentary that #CreateConnectCare is gonna be in. It’s coming out in May 2027 on PBS called Stressolescence about stress and adolescence. Ryan has gone from us not knowing anything about him to bringing mental health into his school.

They still do #CreateConnectCare there, even though he’s, he’s in college, and now he is going to go and help others and use his story and his voice in his career. So we couldn’t be happier. 

Arielle: 

That’s an incredible story, and it must be so rewarding to see it all unfold, seeing a young person grow into a passionate like that. 

Arielle (Narrator): 

#CreateConnectCare is serious about their by youth, for youth stance. Their National Mental Health Youth Council isn’t just symbolic. Their feedback is taken seriously and implemented seriously, and they do a lot of work behind the scenes. So speaking of the National Mental Health Youth Council, what role do young people actually play in how this program runs?

Kathy: 

They create flyers and workshops that we are now sharing with other youth council members. They give workshops in their schools. They give us feedback on what worked and what didn’t work. They also come to meetings. They were on the Mental Health Coalition’s Safe Online Standards focus group, sharing their feelings about social media and what the big companies should do to make young people safe.

Arielle (Narrator): 

The Youth Council is also responsible for coming up with #CreateConnectCare’s most downloaded resource. 

Kathy: 

…our most downloaded resource, which was a Teen Mental Wellness Day activity guide. Teen Mental Wellness Day is March 2nd. Young people and educators are using that throughout the world. 

Arielle (Narrator): Of course, we celebrate the by youth, for youth ethos, but how can parents and trusted adults in young people’s lives help too?

For a parent who might be listening, who earnestly wants to help their teenager, their adolescent, but they are not sure how, what do you want them to maybe think about differently or do differently starting right now? 

Kathy: 

Listen. Listen to your children. In Ryan’s case, one of the things he always talks about is how non-judgmental his mother was and how supportive she was when he talked to her about his struggles.

Struggles are real. Having anxiety about taking a test or your, your tennis match is not clinical anxiety. Nonetheless, it’s still affecting young people’s lives, and in particular, as we mentioned earlier with all the stressors, talk to them about it. Talk to them about what’s going on with the climate.

Stop the social media. Literally put guardrails around how much time they’re on their phone. The biggest thing to me is connect with them and show them how much you love and care about them and how non-judgmental you can be to just support them in their lives, and hopefully… they’ll share their stories with you more that way.

Arielle:

Would that advice change for a teacher who maybe really cares about their students but has no mental health training? 

Kathy:

Actually, in our evaluation report, we found from teachers that using #CreateConnectCare allowed them to have the conversations in the classroom, safe conversations, even if their school didn’t have any program.

It was starting those conversations with young people that allowed the teacher then to get them the help they needed if they, if they need it more than just talking to someone, and it also allowed the teacher to connect with them on a different level. I think you can tell if it’s a, if a triggering, threatening situation, of course you’re gonna go and get help, but a lot of young people just need to, to share their feelings to a real person.

Arielle: 

What does 2027 look like? What are you building towards? You’ve mentioned some, some exciting projects already. 

Kathy: 

Yeah. So we’re, we’re really excited. We’re continuing with our partners who are out in the field who support young people, and we wanna grow our partner network. We are direct to youth, but we also know in order to get to youth, you need teachers, parents, those caring adults in their lives.

One of our goals this year is to have more classroom participation, and so we developed some new resources for educators. Interestingly, these new resources came from the educators who used #CreateConnectCare last year and gave us what they used in their classroom, so we know it was successful. We really like to build on what the field, what the people are, the educators, the young people are doing.

The last thing that we really are gearing toward is really a movement, having more people know about #CreateConnectCare. Eventually, what we would love to do is to do something to get young people more support in possibly bills that are, for at least in the US, that are in Congress, that are lined up with young people’s mental health, and just have everybody feel that safe space to, to be seen.

Arielle (Narrator): 

Are you interested in participating, or do you know a young person who would love to come up with a submission for #CreateConnectCare’s 2027 annual challenge? Well, considering that tomorrow is World Mental Health Day, now would be a great time to start thinking about this .

Kathy: 

Another new thing we have this year is called a teacher advisory group.

We have six teachers who are on our advisory group, and so they’re going to be working with us on what kind of outreach we can do starting on World Mental Health Day to ramp up so people, teachers, young people are prepared. ‘Cause some educators have told us they really wanna fit this into their class schedule, so they need it more time.

January 5th is when we open the portal for submissions, and it runs through March 31st. Our intention with that is really so that we can announce our awards in May before young people leave their schools. This year, our website’s really in a good place, and we can start ramping up now, but it officially opens on January 5th .

Arielle: 

For anyone listening who wants to get involved right now, a young person, a teacher, a parent, anyone, what’s the simplest way in?

Kathy: 

Go to createconnectcare.org. There’s a youth portal, so if you’re a young person, you can go through there. We have suggested projects. One of the ones that young people really love, and it’s simple and easy, is Behind the Mask. You have one side of your mask where you put all the things that you let people see.

You’re happy, you’re bubbly, you’re whatever. Then behind the mask, you’re sad, you’re scared. And so it shows young people that they really need to be more open about what’s behind the mask. And so that’s a very simple project that you can do. And if you can remember and save it, you could then actually submit it in January.

But there are lots of different things that teachers can do to get their classrooms ready, do some of the classroom activities in advance of the submission in January. 

Arielle: 

Thank you so much, Kathy. This has been such a great conversation, and I am really looking forward to seeing what is submitted for this month’s…

Arielle (Narrator): 

All relevant links for #CreateConnectCare can be found in the show notes.

But again, their website is createconnectcare.org. Their Instagram is very simply #CreateConnectCare, no spaces. If you visit either of these pages, you will be able to browse through some of the incredible artwork that has been submitted. There are featured posts on their Instagram, but on the website, you will have access to the whole gallery and this year’s award winners.

There, you can read the poem Kathy spoke about, No Es Ilegal, and also check out a dance performance that a student choreographed for the Behind the Mask project, and so, so, so much more I hope all you optimists out there feel as inspired as I do from these conversations with Kathy and Lilly. A huge, huge thank you to them both for sharing their time and energy with us today.

And you listeners haven’t heard from her, but I want to recognize and appreciate Ellie, the wonderful communications wizard who brought #CreateConnectCare to the Optimist Daily’s attention, and was an essential part of making this happen. And last but not least, a big shout-out to all you optimists for being here, for listening, and for being a part of this positive solutions-forward movement.

If you have any feedback, comments, questions, or just want to say hi, you can follow us and engage with us @OptimistDaily on all social platforms except for X. There we are @OdeToOptimism. You can also reach me and Karissa directly at podcast@optimistdaily.com. As we always do with these feature episodes, we end with a last bit of wisdom from our guests in the form of the best advice they have ever received.

I’ll let Kathy and Lilly bring us home. So thanks once again, optimists. I wish you a wonderful weekend ahead and a meaningful World Mental Health Day. Karissa and I will be back next week with more solutions.

Arielle: S

o I’m going to do the same question for everyone, which is, what is the best advice you’ve ever received?

Kathy: 

Well, I’m an empath, which is a good thing and a bad thing. And so one of my dear friends continues to give me the same advice, which is lower your expectations and you’ll be much happier. So I’m trying really hard to lower my expectations. It’s not easy, but when I do, I feel very happy. 

Lilly: 

It’s from this poem called George Gray.

In the poem, this is just a little backstory. The guy, it’s him looking at his tombstone. It’s a boat still at the harbor that he had lived at for his whole life. And so it’s supposed to symbolize how he never took the time and had the courage to really leave that safe space that he was in. And I feel like that’s a message that really resonated with me.

During my freshman year and my start of my sophomore year, I was really putting things off. And I was saying that there’s always more time. It’s okay if I’m not involved with it yet. I’ll just get involved with it later. And so this really reminded me that you should take the leap. You should go out and make the life that you want to live.

Pursue everything that you want to, even if you’re scared of being judged. And this was really what got me to take part in so many different organizations and to live a life that I find value from. Because sometimes it’s scary to take the leap, to be a leader like it was at the first meeting of #CreateConnectCare.

But even though I felt scared and I was leaving someplace that I felt safe in and stepping out of my comfort zone, it ended up being what was best for me. So unfurl your sails!