Evaluation
what we learned throughout our project was the different types of metal health issues young people in our community suffer from for example anxiety, depression and obsessive compulsive disorder. We also learned about the different facilities in our area that help young people get through there struggles and where to turn to if we are having hard times. We also got an idea of how it feels for someone with mental health issues and how scary and alone it can be. People with mental health issues feel isolated and think that they have no one to turn to because they believe no one will understand. From making the video we learned how important it is to work as a team we all had to do things outside of our comfort zone and we got a better understanding of how it feels to have mental health issues because we put ourselves in their shoes so we could do an accurate video.
We learned so many skills doing this project but the main skills and the ones I think are the most important that we gained are that we now know what to do if we need help and want to talk about the issues that are bothering us. We also gained the skills to be able to help friends who may be going through their own personal struggle and guide them on where to get help.
We think that everyone in our community has Benefited from the work we did in our project in some way. As part of spreading positive Mental Health we decided to do a games night with our leaders other group Girlz Aloud. They are a group of girls between the ages of 10 and 12. We did this to see if we could make them laugh and smile because smiling and laughing is a natural Anti-Depressant. It was really fun we played snatch the bacon, dodge ball, stuck in the mud, caterpillar race and musical statues. The younger girls really enjoyed it and laughed the whole time they're begging us to do it again. I think this helps our community because the younger group were so happy the whole time we played the games and hopefully any issues they could of been having disappeared and they realised that things are not so bad. We played the games for a hour and a half and then tried to decide what we wanted to definitely sell on our stall at spring break. Our leaders are really proud of all the work were putting into our project and keep telling us how happy they are to see us working together as a team and doing the things that need to be done. Spring break is going to help our community because we are giving out lollies with positives messages on them so that people feel good when they read the message. I really hope that everything were doing helps the people in our community see the light at the end of the tunnel. We also went to spring break and gave out lollies with positive messages attached to them, we thought that by doing this we could spread a positive vibe around the event and make anybody who feeling down that day feel better and enjoy themselves at the festival. We also sold keyrings with positive phrases on them like “Stay Strong” and “Love” on them, these sold really well and now people can see them everyday. We held a disco for young people in our local community center we played upbeat music and gave out prizes for “The happiest person”, “Best dancer” and “Best Dressed” everybody at the disco really enjoyed themselves and we think that this was a great way to spread positive Mental Health and a few of the young people made new friends. As the last part of our project we made a video showing how it feels for young people with different Mental health issues. The Mental Health disorders that we focused on were Depression, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Anxiety, Schizophrenia and Eating Disorders. We uploaded the video to YouTube and it now has 985 views we really want to get as man y views as we can on our video but if we even got 1,000 views that would be amazing!. We sent our video to many news papers and radio shows although not all of them promoted the video Breaking News and the journal were nice enough to write an article about our video and Phoenix FM posted it to their website.
We faced a lot of challenges on the way to be at this place. Some challenges that we faced were a small space of time to prepare for the event. Another problem was people ordered key-rings and frames but never came to collect them. The challenges we faced with the disco was that the venue we were supposed to do it in Captain Americas but was too expensive. We had another venue but they got back to us too late as we had our venue booked by then. So we had our disco at the local community center and it was really fun and we spread a lot of positive messages and made a lot of young people smile. It was a really good turn out and have over come all our challenges. Although we faced many challenges, we kept our heads high and stayed positive. Our hard work payed off and we achieved our goals of raising awareness of mental health and making people feel happy and confident in themselves. We think that we did a really good job with our project and we can’t think of anything that we would change. If we were to hold another disco we would like to have it in a different venue but that's the only thing that we would like to do differently.
We hope to continue raising awareness and we plan to continue on learning about Mental Health in our group. We think that our efforts would go to waist if we were to just stop now that the awards are over we want to raise as much as possible because Mental Health much a big issue and one that not a lot of people understand. We are hoping that we have helped people even if isn't just one person that we have helped them through a their struggles.
We really enjoyed our project and everyone is so proud of the work we put into it. We learned so much and all our hard work has paid off.
