IWES receives federal grant to address Black youth mental health
31st October 2022 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
A southeast Louisiana public-health research organization has received a $400,000 federal grant to help develop the organization’s youth-oriented, mental health services.
Last month, U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, D-Louisiana, announced that the New Orleans-based Institute for Women and Ethnic Studies is one of eight organizations nationwide to garner federal funding through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Minority Health. The eight organizations will receive a total of $3 million to promote the mental health of Black youth.
Carter told The Louisiana Weekly that youth of color today face a variety of stresses, emotional crises and psychological traumas as a result of the structural racism, shortages in resources and economic challenges that continue to wrack much of the Black community.
Often, these oppressive factors can have such a negative impact of Black youth that the youth have to fight to stay alive.
“It is critical that we provide mental health support and resources for Black youth to assist them with the challenges they face every day due to the color of their skin and the negative stigmas that have been attached to being Black,” Carter said.
“Further, they are suffering from centuries of structural racism and tend to have fewer resources to access mental health services and mental health care. Due to these inequities, we are now facing the tragic reality that Black children under age 13 are twice as likely to die by suicide compared to their white peers.”
“It’s absolutely unacceptable,” Carter added. “Our system is failing to help our dear children stay healthy inside and out.”
U.S. Navy Rear Admiral and DHHS Deputy Assistant Secretary for Minority Health Felicia Collins, M.D., had similar thoughts in a prepared statement in a press release.
“With this new initiative,” said Collins, “we intend to identify specific policies that exhibit a meaningful impact on mental health for Black youth and to spread the word about these effective policy efforts.”
Carter said funding programs such as the new grants from the Department of Health and Human Services “will allow researchers and advocates to take a deeper look at the current mental health crises in the Black community and identify policies to promote mental health care.”
Carter said grant awardees are required to examine their policy frameworks to pinpoint their current policies aimed at promoting mental health among youth of color and examine the impact of those policies in a variety of settings including schools, faith-based organizations, community and health centers, and other community-agency programs.
To that end, he said, the IWES and the other seven recipients of the federal grants can hopefully develop innovative programs that can serve as a blueprint for other such organizations across America.
“Through the findings and insight that these grants will help produce in think-tanks across the country, these institutions will help create proposals that can serve as models to more effectively fight the nation’s Black youth mental health crisis and save countless lives,” he said. “These grants are an important first step in the right direction.”
Staffers at the Institute for Women and Ethnic Studies said they are extremely happy that their organization will now have the opportunity to study and expand the institute’s youth outreach and counseling programs. “We definitely worked hard on the application, and we’re greatly relieved to get [the grant],” said Christina Illarmo, director of the institute’s Collective for Healthy Communi-ties. “We’re thrilled to be doing it.”
Illarmo said the IWES will use the federal grant to develop a youth advisory program, with the goal of building better outcomes for local Black youth. She said the institute will create numerous opportunities for paid youth to contribute their thoughts on how to better provide quality mental-health outreach efforts.
“We want to request their expertise, honor their voice and compensate them,” Illarmo said.
She said applications specifically for youth 18 to 25 years old to become advisory fellows under the new grant program will be accepted beginning in November. Most of the advisory sessions will take place virtually, with some taking place in person. Illarmo said some of the advisory efforts will be site-specific, adding that the IWES is hoping to focus some of the sessions at Covenant House.
Illarmo said some of the conversations with the advisory youth will focus on the intersection of youth mental-health challenges and the justice system, which is too often where Black youth with mental illnesses end up instead of receiving the quality mental-health care they need.
She added that these criminal justice-related discussions will take place in partnership with the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, with the goal of assessing the ways the legal system, in essence, attacks struggling Black youth emotionally and psychologically.
The IWES project is projected to last three years, a lengthy stretch of time that will allow the IWES and the youth they recruit to really dig deeply into the challenges of facing Black youth and ways to help them.
“That’s what makes it so exciting,” she said.
Meagan Dunham, the IWES’ Health Services and Research Administration’s program associate, said the grant will help the institute examine multiple systems of youth support and gauge the effect those systems are having on local Black youth, in both crisis situations and long-term care.
“We’re really going to lean on the work already being done in the city, because it’s really a collective effort,” Dunham said. “We want to sustain our ability [to serve youth of color].”
Illarmo said the IWES has already identified a slew of other local organizations and institutions that are partnering with the IWES, including Metropolitan Human Services District; the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights; the New Orleans Children and Youth Planning Board; Covenant Health; the Institute of Mental Hygiene; New Orleans Public Schools; the National Alliance on Mental Illness; the New Orleans Mayor’s Office; Southern University at New Orleans; and the Louisiana Public Health Institute.
“There’s a lot of really great organizations doing the work [toward mental health] in the city,” Illarmo said.
Carter said stigmas about mental health caused by decades and centuries of systemic racism are common in the Black community, especially for Black men. However, he expressed optimism that such restrictive and unhealthy views of mental illness and mental health must be combated while Black kids are still young, which is when many people of color first experience symptoms and effects of mental illness.
“For far too long we’ve sat back and silenced one another’s lived experiences, even as we collectively feel the pressures and stereotypes imposed on us by society,” he said. “Now, the Black community is taking a stance to spread awareness of mental health issues so folks identify the signs, where mental health challenges are originated from, and to get the support they need. We are learning that it is okay to not be okay.”
In the end, Carter said, youth need to be empowered with the help of their peers to believe in themselves and in their place within society.
“As folks say, ‘it takes a village,’” he said, “and we must rally behind the youth – our future – to ensure that they understand they are appreciated, beautiful, and we believe that each of them hold enormous potential and individual value. Just by being their true, authentic selves.”
This article originally published in the October 31, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
