May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Mental illnesses affect everybody, but certain groups, like certain students of color, are up to twice less likely to seek treatment.

Are you a young person of color? Feeling down, stressed or overwhelmed? Text STEVE to 741741 and a live, trained Crisis Counselor will receive the text and respond to you quickly to provide support. The volunteer Crisis Counselor will help you move from a hot moment to a cool moment.

With support from the Knight Foundation, the Steve Fund has partnered with Crisis Text Line to provide this text messaging service as a means to improve the critically needed access for young people of color to crisis counseling. The Fund views text messaging as a key component of its strategy towards addressing the unmet mental health needs of this population. The Steve Fund is now actively recruiting a group of young people of color into the Crisis Text Line training program to become crisis counselors on their platform. If you are interested in applying to be a Crisis Counselor, supporting the mental health needs of young people of color, please visit www.crisistextline.org/the-steve-fund or learn more here, apply to be a volunteer or download the Steve Fund Crisis Text Line Flyers here.

The Steve Fund is the nation’s only organization focused on the mental health and emotional well-being of students of color. Right at this moment, there are students of color who are failing academically, suffering emotionally and/OR in some cases are facing serious risk, because population-specific factors influencing mental health are too poorly understood and not acted upon.

The Steve Fund recently has:

 

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