At the high school where Marissa Garcia works as a mental health navigator, she manages a caseload of 20 to 40 students. <\/p>\n
Each week, Garcia meets one-on-one with these students, who have been flagged for slipping attendance, low classroom engagement or another behavior that suggests they might benefit from regular support. She sits and talks with them, trying to understand the barriers that keep them from coming to school. She directs them to community resources for meeting basic needs, like food banks and public assistance programs. She listens to them \u2014 and relates to them \u2014 as they share the challenges of experiencing adolescence in the digital age. <\/p>\n
What\u2019s unique about Garcia is that, at 24, she is not many years removed from the students she\u2019s serving on a daily basis. And that is by design. <\/p>\n
Garcia is one of the 317 young people who served in the inaugural year of the Youth Mental Health Corps<\/a>, a national service initiative that deploys \u201cnear-peer\u201d mentors across communities with limited access to mental health resources. <\/p>\n The initiative comes as youth mental health has been at \u201ccrisis<\/a>\u201d levels for years now, with 2 in 5 high school students reporting they feel sad and hopeless and nearly 1 in 10 saying they have attempted suicide. At the same time, an estimated 132 million Americans<\/a>, or about one-third, live in a community without adequate access to mental health resources, with a shortage of thousands of mental health specialists. <\/p>\n The Youth Mental Health Corps is an attempt to answer both challenges simultaneously. It aims to support middle and high school students who are experiencing, or may be at risk of, mental health challenges, while also giving recent high school and college graduates an opportunity to try on a career in behavioral health. <\/p>\n In its first year, corps members in four states \u2014 Colorado, Minnesota, Michigan and Texas \u2014 worked across 172 service sites and reached an estimated 16,000 students. In year two, which is currently underway, seven more states have joined the initiative: California, Iowa, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Utah and Virginia. Another seven states are actively planning to deploy corps members in the 2026-27 school year, bringing the total to 18. <\/p>\n Tracy Huebner, director of special programs and initiatives at WestEd, a nonpartisan research agency, was brought in earlier this year to evaluate the impact<\/a> of the initial implementation of the Youth Mental Health Corps. <\/p>\n Already, she says, school leaders in participating sites have seen positive changes in the form of reduced behavioral referrals and improved student attendance<\/a>. Students also seem to be benefitting from reduced stigma around mental health, as a growing number are proactively asking for help. <\/p>\n \u201cAdults who supervised corps members saw their value add,\u201d Huebner shares. \u201cThey are an extra set of eyes, an extra pair of hands, and just brought something to the environment that wasn\u2019t there before.\u201d<\/p>\n