More than 500 high school students around Omaha joined together for the fourth annual Youth Summit at the Bellevue Christian Community Center on March 26. The group focused a light on the current mental health struggles of their peers, working to make a change.
Booths from local organizations provided mental health resources, a keynote speaker, a variety of breakout sessions for students to choose from and brought therapy dogs for attendees to interact with.
The event is hosted by The Kim Foundation, which is a non-profit in Omaha that creates supportive resources for people who struggle or know others who struggle with mental illness and self-harm.
“Asking the question is the best way to break the stigma around mental health,” Activities Director of the Kim Foundation, Sidney Spencer, said. “If you don’t ever ask, you won’t know what the person is thinking or what the person wants to talk about.”
The purpose of the summit is to educate students on how to advocate for themselves and others. There were several ways to learn about mental health and its importance.
The Empower Youth Summit was created as a fun day. A lot of the time, mental health topics can be dark and dreary, but the goal of the event was to teach about some of the areas in a fun way.
“We house all of the suicide data for the city, so we are in direct contact with the Omaha Police Department,” Spencer said.
The keynote speaker of the day was Foster Higgins, the creator of “Underwater Flyzone,” a popular mental health podcast where he talks about his experiences with suicide.
At the event, he hosted a live podcast featuring Kailey Hall, a Creighton soccer player; Jocelyn, a music artist who surrounds her music with mental health; and Payton Hogan, a mental health therapist.
“We want to make sure that they have a positive impact on you guys, that they are someone you can reach out to and follow,” Spencer said.
A lot of work goes into making the Youth Summit as helpful and important as possible for teens in the area.
“We are a non-profit, so we welcome volunteers of all kinds. It requires a lot of hands on deck to make it work,” Spencer said.
The Kim Foundation is currently looking for high school and younger students to be part of its youth advisory committee. The youth advisory is a group of middle and high school students who meet every other Sunday to talk about mental health in our communities from their perspectives, and they also participate in many acts of service.
The Kim Foundation can be reached at [email protected]. From there, she can connect you to the right people.
So what does the future of the Summit look like? “We’re thinking 800 students instead of 600,” Spencer said.
Right now, the attendees are mostly from the Omaha metro, but they are hoping to reach out to more rural communities.
Spencer said that she wants students to feel empowered. She wants people to leave knowing that mental health doesn’t have to be a scary thing to talk about.
