I grew up seeing my uncle suffer from schizophrenia and the stigma around his condition. This motivated me to dig deep into neurological and mental health conditions, and try to understand them better. In 2019, when I was a part of the 1000 Girls 1000 Futures Mentorship program of the New York Academy of Science, I had the opportunity to interact with girls from across the world. We somehow got to talking about mental health and realized that the stigma around these conversations were somewhat universal. So we decided to get together and do something about it. That's how our e-magazine project 'MindChamps' was born.
Once the first edition of the e-magazine came out, many young people wanted to join us and support our cause. We grew in size (completely virtual team of 40+ members) and in the breadth of our initiatives - going from blog articles to Instagram lives to webinars, creating resource packs, driving awareness campaigns and virtual events. Within a year, we became a youth-led non-profit on a mission to bridge the gaps in awareness, accessibility and inclusion in the mental health space. We began partnering with organizations, mental health professionals, youth groups and influencers for the multiple initiatives we were working on. However, by mid 2021 we realized that we had too much on our plate and many of our members were facing burnout. So we decided to take a step back and cut down on the initiatives we were doing.
That's when we conceptualized a new initiative called the Listening Circle, to offer young people a safe space to explore their emotion and support each other. It began as a support system for our team members who were going through rough patches in their lives. And then it began to grow with friends and friends of friends joining in. Guided by experienced psychologists and facilitated by trained volunteers, we ran Listening Circles online throughout most of 2022.
By the end of 2022, participation in virtual Listening Circles began to dwindle - we were sure that it is a post-Covid trend and that the best way to deal with it is to take our sessions in-person. Then we figured out that the best way to shift to an in-person would be to train individuals to run Listening Circles within their communities, instead of our team being everywhere. We recruited a program manager and started with curriculum development. In April 2023, I was going through a difficult phase in my life. I needed to fix multiple axes and so I took a break from Yours Mindfully.
During my break, I tried to organize a Listening Circle in-person at my university and failed at it pretty badly. People did not trust others enough (because they knew each other too well?). And in the absence of trust, building Listening Circles within communities/institutions would be a challenge. Young people prefer anonymous settings, which is why so many of us rely on apps to vent our feelings. Now I started reaching out to mental health professionals, founders in the space, impact assessors and funding agencies. I wanted to know what they felt about the space and the opportunities for a youth-led organization to step in.
Soon I realized that the mental health ecosystem in India is extremely messy - the issue is not just with the stigma and the lack of accessibility and affordability. The problems are complex - we do not have enough hard-core research on mental health issues, there is wayyy too much misinformation even among mental health practitioners, the training system for young psychologists is not well defined and we do not have strong enough policies around mental health support. Mental health is a buzzword so everyone is vying to join the bandwagon, especially startup founders. Many of them do not even realize what they are getting into, and that tips the balance in the wrong direction.
These conversations got me reflecting on my role in the mental health space - what have I done as a founder in the last (almost) four years? Has it made any difference at all? Now that I know better what should my role look like? How do I get down to doing something more sustainable?
To be fair, the work we did at Yours Mindfully has impacted over 10,000 young people worldwide (between 2019 and 2022) and partnered with organizations such as UNICEF, the Malala Fund and multiple youth-led organizations and dozens of professionals from diverse backgrounds. These are big wins for a youth-led organization that I started as a high schooler - with zero experience, with 0 access to networks or mentorship. And I think the entire initiative came full circle for me when I saw my dad talk to the extended family openly about my uncle's schizophrenia for the first time in years; when my team at Yours Mindfully nudged me to take breaks and seek support when I was facing severe burnout.
Through the painful transition from high school to university amidst a global pandemic, through the challenging experience of moving away from home for university and through the loss of some of my closest friendships - Yours Mindfully has been my rock. As much as we were working for social impact we were also impacting each other deeply, in meaningful ways. I have built a team that has an incredible work culture -with members supporting one another, encouraging mental health breaks and forging friendships outside of all the volunteer work. Now that I look back at these, I am super proud of the 17 year old who decided to get started in an unknown space, figuring out a path for herself.
Celebrating the wins is awesome. But the question still remains - what next?
Do I want to take up Yours Mindfully full time after I graduate? I reflected on this question numerous times over the last month. As much as I care deeply about mental wellbeing, I am more fascinated by the wet-lab work I am doing with nanoparticles for ovarian/endometrial cancer therapy. That's what I want to build a career in. I need the academic stimulus that comes from biochemistry research at least for a few more years. So my answer to this question is no. Then what? Do I want to wind down Yours Mindfully and move on? Not really
I got back to the most active members of my team and had an honest conversation. No one wanted to move away from Yours Mindfully but neither did they want to take it up full time. We also wanted to create something that is not restricted by geographies - because we will all be moving to different parts of the world in the next few years. We wanted to create something that sustains over the years and possibly acts as qualitative human-centric research for new initiatives in the mental health space (lack of research is also a serious barrier to new initiatives).
All that being said, now we are making a pivot - Yours Mindfully is now going to be a storytelling platform. What kind of stories? Who tells them? Who listens to them? - we are yet to figure this out. We are in the early stages of research and we are going to take our time to zero in (or not to) on the niche. The concept of research is also something that comes with some level of experience - as a 17 year old I jumped into initiatives on an impulse but now my decisions are going to be more data-driven.
If this idea of a storytelling platform centered on wellbeing appeals to you, I would love to know what you think. Meanwhile, do check out our Instagram page to find out more about everything we have done so far.