Federal grant awarded to address Black youth mental health in New Orleans

By Liza Montgomery
Contributing Writer

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a $1.2 million grant awarded to The Institute of Women and Ethics Studies (IWES), a national non-profit community-based public health organization based in New Orleans. The IWES along with seven other organizations were awarded the grant for implementing a new initiative to demonstrate policy efficacy to address Black youth mental health, with a focus on suicide prevention.

“Black youth experience disproportionate mental health conditions due to racially biased environmental factors, not due to biologic predisposition,” said IWES’ founder Dr. Denese Shervington, who is a psychiatrist and public health practitioner, in a statement.

The non-profit has been evaluating Black youth mental health since 2012 in New Orleans and their findings through the Emotional Wellness Screener indicated that 12 percent of the city’s young people that were surveyed, of which a majority were Black, endorsed suicidal ideation. The grant will support IWES and the seven awardees across the country to develop a three-year initiative to test the effect of existing policies on Black youth mental health in different environments, like schools, community centers, health centers and faith-based organizations.

With this new initiative, the eight new Black Youth Mental Health grantees will work to combat the rise in youth suicides amongst Black youth over the course of the demonstration project. IWES will gather youth ambassadors, core implementation partners (CIPs), and an advisory council to identify and examine current policies in education, the juvenile legal system, and the social services sector. All categories will be assessed on their impact on the wellbeing and mental health of Black youth.

“While policies and systems exist to mitigate poor mental health outcomes, far too often they fail to adequately and meaningfully address the multi-layered and complex intersection of factors that lead to these outcomes,” said Rheneisha Robertson, the executive director of Covenant House New Orleans, one of the implementation partners that will work with IWES on the grant.

Through collaboration with law enforcement, other local agencies, and community-based organizations, the initiative will work to identify the root contributors to declining mental health among Black youth and develop statewide, as well as nationwide, mental health preparedness and response plans to improve support systems which eliminate inequalities in mental health services.

The HHS funding allows IWES to partner with 14 entities such as the City of New Orleans’ Children & Youth Planning Board, Metropolitan Human Services District, Covenant House, and the Louisiana Public Health Institute, as well as other social service organizations, establishments, and a government leader all based in Louisiana, to try and combat the nation’s mental health crisis amongst Black youth to make their communities safer.

IWES’ team stated that the grant furthers their ongoing work as an ally in the city to continue to tackle the effects on emotional health and well-being of all youth in New Orleans. The organization’s team hopes to apply the insights gained from the grant’s implementation to spur local and state policies to meet the needs of young people in the community.

“This grant will help us better understand how to disrupt these socially constructed factors, in addition to providing culturally resonant and compassionate psychosocial supports for Black youth and their families. It is time that we come together as a city to show youth that they matter, and that we care,” said Shervington in a statement.

This article originally published in the December 5, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.