PWHS Mental Health Kit Giveaway

Last week, we visited Proviso West High School to give away more mental health kits. This time, we were a guest at Proviso West's first annual wellness event, where other organizations were also sharing resources, like the Community Healing Resource Center. The Resource Center works within Chicago to provide workshops to the community that generate healing. While our team handed out mental health kits, Maya and Jasmine filmed more interviews on community healing.

We handed out 321 mental health kits, our biggest giveaway this semester. This was our last giveaway for the school year. This school year, we gave away almost 900 kits. We look forward to next school year!

Black and Brown Art Convening

Our Black and Brown Solidarity Art Convening was a success! Over a hundred people came through and viewed our youth artist’s work. Our youth team, Adlemy, Amaryani, Jazmynn, Neidalis, Milo, and Savannah planned the entire event. Shoutout to them!

We started off our evening with a chance to view the art gallery. We had 14 art submissions, all by youth who live in the Proviso district. Their work ranged from digital art to drawings and photography. Before the presentations, Jazmynn and Amaryani led our guests through an icebreaker. Neighbors, community members, and guests shared their thoughts. Next, we had our spoken word youth, Jermaine from PMSA, present his piece. He talked about what good allyship looks like to continue to respect African American struggles. Then, Milo, Amaryani, Adlemy, and Jermaine, PMSA students, presented their video, which showed a day in the life of the Latina experience and the black experience. After, the youth team did a Q&A so the audience could learn more about the project.

After our presentations, there was more time to explore the space. We had Tacos Regio food truck making Tacos. Our drink table had aqua frescas and lemonade. We also had a table of black and brown cultural desserts from small businesses from the community (Borinken Cakes, Krazy Grapes, Kribi Coffee, Panaderia Pueblo, Sweet Tooth N Company, Yanira and Emilia's Taste of Puerto Rico).

Thank you so much to the youth team who put on this event. Also, we are so grateful for all our guests who came and supported the youth!

PMSA Mental Health Kit Giveaway

Last Thursday, we continued to celebrate Mental Health Awareness Month by hosting a mental health kit giveaway at PMSA. This season, we downgraded to smaller kits but with all the same contents! The kits still contain multiple fidgets, smaller journals, journal prompts, digital mental health resource cards, feelings wheel, and pens. This time, we gave away 150+ kits away at PMSA. We were so excited to see the students still passionate about our kits and mental health. As we gave away kits, we did some interviews with students about what mental health means to them. Look out on our Instagram for the full videos.

PMSA Mental Health Club Celebration

As the school year comes to a close, we finished our last mental health club with a celebration! All the students were invited to reflect and eat pizza. We learned their favorite workshops, key takeaways, and what we could do next school year. We finished up with a celebratory presentation of all the pictures we had taken throughout the year.

Thank you to the PMSA students, Ms. Gart, and our community partners for joining us this school year. We are so excited for what’s to come next semester.

Yoga | PMSA's Mental Health Club

Hey neighbors! This week was our last session of workshops with PMSA’s mental health club. For our last workshop, we spent it outside with Proviso native, Dasia. Dasia led the students through a relaxing yoga flow after school. Through the series of poses to the ending rest position, the students had fun! We are excited to celebrate all our 23-24 workshops with the facilitators and students!