The surprise in a Zoom call on youth mental health

I sometimes complain about how much time I spend on Zoom. But then I’ll have an experience that reminds me that video calls can be near-magical portals to connection with the other side of the world.

Last month, I had one such call when I Zoomed in to Bidibidi, the largest refugee settlement in Uganda and home to more than a quarter million people who fled South Sudan. I was meeting with several young participants in a program run by Artolution, an organization that brings community mural-making and arts education into crisis settings.

The call was part of the research behind a new website that the Solutions Insights Lab has been building over the past half year called What's Working: Youth Mental Wellbeing, which officially launches today. It’s a collaboration with the Youth Mental Wellbeing Co-Lab — 25 of the most innovative programs working on youth mental health around the world.

Artolution is one of them, and what struck me was how much of the program's mental-health support happens indirectly. In Bidibidi, as in most refugee settlements, there is almost nothing to do. The future can seem drained of potential, and the rest of the world, including home, inaccessible. The Artolution program, they said, gave them community, purpose, and a horizon.

One young man told me he had already begun a career as an artist for hire inside the camp; a few years ago, he had never touched a brush. Another said that before Artolution, he hadn't known that people made art; he assumed that it was done by computers, and the revelation that he had that ability himself was transformative. They described an Artolution exercise where participants are asked to choose a work of art they didn't make and explain it to the group, which opened up to them the meanings of art and culture at large.

I got to see this process in action: Behind them on the Zoom screen was a mural that some of their fellow participants had painted, and when I asked them to tell me what it depicted, their dreams and aspirations came tumbling out along with their descriptions.

This wasn’t what I imagined a mental-health program looked like when we started this project last year, and the way these programs actually work continually surprises me. That’s why What's Working: Youth Mental Wellbeing exists, and why I think its insights will resonate even beyond the field of youth mental health.

— Rollo Romig

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📢 EVENT

From Insight to Action: Advancing Youth Mental Health Solutions

If you're in Oxford this week, please join Solutions Insights Lab and the Youth Mental Wellbeing Co-Lab at a Sidebar event on Thursday, April 23rd, at 3 PM BST, where we'll be launching the new site. ​Through a blended and interactive format, participants will engage directly with the Co-Lab organizations' many different approaches to youth mental health.

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Three Ways to Approach Letting Young People Lead

"We often say the youth are the future, but I feel it's important that the youth are the today as well. That's central to the message of the program and the way that we design things." — Youth voice, #HalfTheStory

"Young people had to create a new word to tell each other that they were stressed. An older medical professional who is not your near peer is not able to explain it to you in ways that you would understand." — Charmaine Nyakonda, Grassroot Soccer

"Young people in a region know what their community needs, rather than an organization assuming what's needed. Being able to give power and autonomy to young people to lead on creating and working with their communities is very exciting." — Hannah Hooper, Force of Nature