Across Illinois, we were your ordinary high school students.
Scattered across Illinois, we were your everyday high school students, students who noticed a fatal problem in the systems that served them. Throughout our time growing up, we've had various moments of unlearning and relearning what self-care meant, as high academic standards began to tear away at our mental well-being. Not only did we all face our unique challenges, but we saw again and again peers our age struggling as well. However, some of them, including our closest friends, kept their pain hidden away under laughter and smiles, until it eventually took their lives.
As we've started to work towards preventing mental health crises like these, we've found that our paths often cross into one main realization: there is an underlying assumption in our current systems that mental health is not a priority. From what we've seen from those our age, many of us haven't been raised to take our mental health as seriously as our physical health.
We combatted this assumption through many of our earliest initiatives, which were drawn from our experience in leading policy changes and interventions in health, climate change, and mental health spaces. However, as we continued building Speak Now, we began to realize that our voices alone are not enough. From not feeling like we deserved extra support even during our hardest moments, to not receiving the proper care when we needed it, we realized we needed more than just ourselves to tackle these deep-rooted flaws.
WHAT WE'VE LEARNED
Our journeys taught us that real change cannot happen in a vacuum or behind closed doors that exclude the very people we aim to serve. We are shifting the power back to the community, turning the struggle for representation into a global movement where every young person has the agency to define what healing looks like for them—what it means to feel solidarity and hope within their support network.
ROAD MAP
