Creating positive school cultures around mental health

Erika’s Lighthouse is a not-for-profit dedicated to educating and raising awareness about adolescent depression, encouraging good mental health and breaking down the stigma surrounding mental health issues. We work with school communities to create positive culture change around mental health. This work is achieved through four pillars: Classroom Education, Teen Empowerment, Family Engagement, and School Policy & Staff Development. Our programs are Tier-1 programs and impact every student in the school to promote help-seeking and normalize conversations around mental health issues. Our Classroom Programs, for students in grades 4-12, are skills-based, evidence-informed programs designed to introduce mental health and depression-literacy with a focus on good mental health and help-seeking. Teen Empowerment Clubs empower teens to take a leadership role in their schools to create a culture of good mental health. While our School Policy & Staff Development, and Family Engagement programs use webinars and supporting material to make sure everyone in the school community has the knowledge to support students. By engaging the entire school community, we strive to normalize conversations around mental health and support a culture of good mental health at all levels. All of our programs are fully donor funded and provided to schools free of charge.

Our vision is to make sure no young person feels alone in their depression by becoming the leading provider of school-based depression awareness programs. We are seeing tremendous growth, and last school year we reached over 400,000 students in 41 states. Our strategic plan, Vision 2025 sees us reaching over 1 million students a year with our hopeful and impactful programming. A grant from The Dudley T. Dougherty Foundation would help us achieve that goal.