Well-being Trailblazers

Recreating the Human Experience on Social Media

Ziarekenya Smith, the Founder of Inpathy, and Kathryn Young, the COO at Inpathy, are reimagining social media by introducing real human elements that bring people together emotionally to recreate the human experience. Inpathy’s goal is to show people it’s okay to be human and have a healthy relationship with all emotions online and offline.

Youth Earn Money while Finding Professional Opportunities

As a young person looking for your next opportunity, it is easy to get lost in the countless number of apps, platforms, and google searching. The process can be overwhelming and time-consuming. You may end up signing up for more services that lead to nowhere. Finding your next opportunity should not feel this daunting- it should be easy and fun!

Mentorship as a Proven Tool for Career Success

Dreami is a platform that connects mentees to the mentors they need in their career, based on their professional goals and values. Especially now more than ever, meeting the right mentor to guide your career takes luck, patience, and a lot of LinkedIn messages and coffee chats. Most of the time, it feels like you are left on your own to navigate your career. Dreami is on a mission to break those barriers and provide everyone with the right resources they need to take their career to the level they dream of. Dreami lives and breathes by our belief that together, we are limitless.

Using the Power of Podcast to Uplift Youth Voices

When the Surgeon General released its 2021 advisory on the youth mental health crisis, I was relieved that authorities were finally putting words to what I saw everywhere. As a middle and high school teacher working with youth across the U.S. and throughout the world, I am painfully aware of the ways in which adolescents—especially those who identify as girls — experience disproportionately high rates of anxiety, depression, eating disorders and feelings of isolation. Internal research from Instagram shows that contemporary social media platforms contribute to this mental health crisis by hijacking young women’s attention at a critical time of development, and algorithmically feeding content which can amplify insecurities related to body image and appearance. This Teenage Life (TTL) does the opposite. We help adolescents—especially girls and LGBTQIA+ youth—feel authentically connected and represented through dialogue, community, storytelling, and media production.

An Inclusive Digital Space for Support and Celebration

At Peer Health Exchange’s Youth Innovation Lab, our work is rooted in helping youth navigate today’s harsh world while recognizing that they’re not alone. Our vision is that all young people get the support they need, wherever and whenever they need it, and whoever they are. Part of the challenge that comes with designing for a large population is prioritizing their identities—like race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation—at the forefront, proudly. You can’t design a truly safe space that is safe to just one community– like female-identifying, Black or queer. It needs to be something for whomever comes searching, especially if an individual identifies across various communities.

Backpack Healthcare Reinvents Bibliotherapy Models for Improved Outcomes in Children and Adolescents’ Mental Health

Start Taking the Internet Seriously

Our little place in the world, Earth, has changed in many ways over the time we have been able to record. The ground we walk on has changed shape, and the flora and fauna around us have morphed over time on our hands. The weather fluctuates and so does the life of your average human; all of this is expected and we understand it, even if we don’t like it. But one thing has become a part of our daily life that moves at a pace most can’t keep up with, barely starting to understand its current state before it changes again.