After ending in Feburary 2010, Street Team is finally back and heading for a summer session! With the collaboration of young adults and professional staff of mindyourmind, a new project is on its way. Last time, we were creating new posters for a campaign; this time, we are heading to the technological side. Everything is kind of on the down low, as we are still deciding on what and how it will be rendered useful to youth. So we are in the brainstorming stages right now. 

Like all Street Team sessions, there will always be a new crop of faces, as well as some old ones. Being a past Street Team member myself, I was pretty stoked to see who would be the new members, and was just excited to see familiar faces too. Since it is a group of 9 members, it was easy for us to get along, as no one's voice would be lost in a classroom sized group. Even before Street Team started, we were laughing and making some jokes already, but the icebreakers broke (no pun intended) us out of our shells. We then started to open up about our opinions towards topics of mental health and anti-stigma and did a mini-project to reflect that.

As soon as one of the mindyourmind staff broke out the oil pastels and the table sized sheet of paper, I knew it was going to be an artsy type of mini-project. For the first step, we were told to write down words that people associate with mental illnesses. It could range from stigma of what others think to the feelings of those affected, such as psycho and hopeless. The second step was to go around and draw on the words that you didn't write. It was a given that our group had a lot of art-lovers, because the mural was filled in no time. There were some funny ones, such as someone circling the "ass" of the word assumption, but there were some that were serious as well. One of the drawings that caught my eye was a beautiful sketch of a girl sitting and hugging her knees, as a way of showing how feeling pathetic or hopeless would be. 

In the end, we stopped drawing and took a look around the work we did. It was amazing to see how a group of 9 Street Members all got the same message when it comes to anti-stigma for mental health. Since we meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I have a feeling that this Street Team will get along a lot closer because we will see each other more often!

Written by Amanda, 17 years old