The Friendship Bench
We are The Friendship Bench. Our goal is to create awareness of the signs of depression among college and university students across Canada, as well as to remove the stigma of mental illnesses and discuss causes and prevention. Our staff work with mental health groups across Canada to install a yellow bench on secondary and post-secondary campuses across Canada. The bench represents the importance of mental health awareness, and feature a URL to access mental health and suicide prevention services as well as the hashtag #yellowisforhello. The hashtag encourages discussion of mental health in social media.
Influences There is a growing number of students contemplating suicide, which has increased discussion of mental illness among Canadians. We are looking for support from corporations who want to help address the mental health crises within secondary and post-secondary schools across Canada. Did you know: • In Canada, suicide accounts for 24 percent of all deaths among 15-24 year olds. • Suicide is the second leading cause of death for Canadians between the ages of 10 and 24. • Nearly one in ten Canadian students has seriously considered ending their life. One of the main reasons that plays a big role with students getting depressed and leads to suicide attempts is the pressure they have with school and their jobs.
Publicly Supports We work with Nimble who is a Customer Relations Management (CRM) company. They make it easier to connect on social media. We work with Maglin who makes our yellow friendship bench that we distribute to schools. A way for the friendship bench getting more companies supporting us, as an example – Apple product red can also be product yellow for our purpose.Â
Recommends Three ways you can help.  Request a bench –which stands for yellowisforhello. The bench represents the importance of mental health awareness. You can start by asking yourself, why don’t you have one at your school? All it takes is as simple hello to get the conversation started on the friendship bench. Sharing thoughts and experience with each other can prevent suicide from happing and decreasing the numbers.  Another way you can help us reach our goals and objectives faster is to donate. It helps us raise more awareness about the mental health problem. The last way you can help is promote by starting a group at school that educates the students about the mental health problem. By saying hello and telling a story with somebody can prevent suicide attempt.
https://www.pinterest.com/andrei_dinu/the-friendship-bench/