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I founded a chapter of a national wide non-profit called Active Minds and what we try to do
there is destigmatize mental illness and mental health concerns. So, ultimately what we wanna
do I change the conversation about mental health, right, so, allow people to open up
about it, to talk about it freely, um, to reach out for help. One of the major concerns
is, because of social stigma, we don't reach out for help. There's a big correlation between
the two. We work, socially, to make sure that people would be able to reach out for help
later. We're really trying to help students at Penn State, not only make use of their
own voice, but sort of find a voice. We have really a dire need to start talking, start
speaking about as students. It's staggering. Staggering how many people this impacts. And,
it's very quiet. I mean, statistically, you know, one in five students will be able to
be diagnosed with a mental illness. So, there's something like, what, thirty or forty thousand
students at Penn State. I saw a tremendous need for a group like this. There is also
something I'm working on, called, it's a mobile app, a mobile application that will hit, no
just iPhones, but you know, Android devices. What I'm trying to do is develop this application
to point people in the right direction. To just make use of all of this information that
the person might have. If they can reach out, and look on a discreet mobile device, they
can say, okay this is where they need to go. What I'm going to throw out into the, onto
the internet, is, um, this mobile application that I hope will ultimately help people improve
their lives. It was really a matter of identifying the need in the community and choosing to
serve it. There was a need, there is absolutely a need, there are groups, like CAPS on campus
that do reach out to students, but I saw space for more, I saw space for a student run organization,
like Active Minds in terms of ethical leadership, that's what that means to me. It means that
I saw the space and that I chose to actually do something about it.