My 4 years of high school experience were not like the usual; they were plagued with death (primarily suicide).`5 close friends and about 7 other mutual friends died throughout my teen years, and it hit really hard and furthered my depression immensely. I didn’t know what to do anymore, so I knew I had to take action.

Our community was struggling and I wanted to see my old high school district doing more to prevent this from happening again. I wrote this petition with the goal to make change in our community so no one else would have to go through such immense loss at such a young age. Within days I got almost 14,000 signatures.

I quickly began working with my old district to implement more mental health resources to make it the priority at the high schools. This included focusing on ways we could inject empathy, suicide pre-inter-&post-vention, kindness, therapy resources, designated mental health rooms, curriculum changes, and different protocols into the system that weren’t previously there. I even got to paint a mural (shown above) to represent this whole story.

In late October, I watched TSD, the Netflix Doc that highlights the problems that social media inflicts on our society, and it made me feel so many emotions (if you haven’t yet seen it, I highly recommend doing so). It hit me hard and I wanted be a part of the solution, and thus NoSo November was created, sprouting randomly out of my mind. I proposed it to the mental health workers I’d been working with in the district and we decided we would test run it at a high school. I had no idea it was going to get this big.

I signed up for The Social Dilemma’s newsletter and saw this opportunity for young entrepreneurs with tech solutions to have the chance to win a grant from LookUp to push their projects miles ahead, which I applied for, and somehow ended up winning alongside 11 other great teams. With their help, this project has turned into something bigger than myself, which I am so grateful for.

After all that, I am now here, endlessly grateful that my message to prioritize mental health and educate teens on the negative effects of social media is now being discussed in a school setting, and is impacting real lives. As they say, there is always a silver lining to any situation, and these tragic deaths that still impact me everyday have created something beautiful, that is saving lives every day. This is all for them.