Welcome Remarks for Steve Fund Convening

Good morning, everyone. It’s my pleasure to welcome you to Georgetown for this special gathering.

We come together today in advance of the sixth annual “Young, Gifted, & @Risk” conference, which we are privileged to host at Georgetown this November, in partnership with the Steve Fund.

We’re deeply grateful to the Steve Fund—for their presence and partnership on this gathering today and the work ahead. Their leadership has deepened our understanding of how best to ensure the well-being of our students of color at our nation’s colleges and universities, and worked to bring these important issues to the forefront of our national conversation on mental health. We’re especially grateful to several leaders of the Steve Fund who are with us today:

• Stephanie Bell-Rose, one of the founders of the Steve Fund;
  
• Dr. Annelle Primm, Senior Medical Advisor for the Steve Fund, member of the Knowledge Committee;
  
• Dr. Alfiee Breland-Noble, Senior Scientific Advisor to the Steve Fund, who played a leading role in the Equity in Mental Health Framework developed in 2017 by the Steve Fund and the JED Foundation. We are privileged to also have Dr. Breland-Noble on our faculty here at Georgetown, where she directs the AAKOMA Project, “African American Knowledge Optimized for Mindfully-Healthy Adolescents”; and,
  
• Dr. Meeta Kumar, part of the Steve Fund’s Knowledge Committee and Director of Outreach and Prevention Services at the Counseling and Psychological Services at the University of Pennsylvania.

Thank you all for being here.

It’s an honor to be joined by so many colleagues who are doing remarkable work to pursue equity in mental health for our communities, particularly on our college and university campuses. Some of you are counseling and supporting our young people directly. Others are strengthening services for our LGBTQ students, students from marginalized communities, students who are first-generation. Some are focused on academic support and resources.

Others are focused on removing barriers to access and are enhancing accessibility. Still others are leading the way through research that helps us to strengthen our understanding of mental health and the unique challenges faced by students of color.

We are connected by a shared commitment present in all of this work—a commitment to the flourishing of our young people.

What does flourishing mean, in the context of higher education?

Our nation’s colleges and universities share a core set of commitments: the formation of our young people, the inquiry of our faculty, and the common good of the communities in which we participate. Ensuring that our students are able to do the work of formation—with the resources and support they need—is central to our work.

We seek to provide a context for our students to become their most authentic selves—to live in accord with their most deeply held values; to realize their full promise and understand the depth and breadth of what they are capable of contributing to our world. It is a critical mission of the university to enable an “authentic self” to emerge and to enable that authentic self, through what we introduce within the university, to flourish.

This is the work of colleges and universities. It can get lost in the midst of the chaos and confusion of our Twitter feeds, of 24-hour news cycles, of unprecedented demand for counseling services. It can be difficult to recall the moral impetus that drew all of us into this work at a time in our lives when we were searching for a vocation to sustain our own sense of meaning in our lives.

At this moment when our young people are negotiating their personal journeys of authenticity, the contours of their identities, in the turbulence of these early years of this new century, it is urgent that we recommit ourselves to the distinctive responsibilities we share to the work of formation that can only take place on the campuses of our colleges and universities—and recommit to ensuring that there is equity in the services and resources that allow our young people to flourish.

This means that we must recognize the additional challenges that our students of color are facing in the college environment—from discrimination and everyday micro-aggressions to a lack of trust or visibility that some may feel in predominantly white institutions.

As we consider what it means to attend to the well-being of our students of color…what it means to enable our students to persist through graduation…we remember that our aim is more than coping with the challenges facing our young people; we seek the cultivation of individual authenticity. Well-being is not the absence of mental health issues—rather, it is the presence of the search for authenticity, the pursuit of interior freedom in the lives of our young people…a pursuit that will enable them to identify the conditions for flourishing.

This is the work that each of you are engaged in—the work that brings us together today. And this gathering provides an opportunity for us to reflect on what comes next.

As you know, this is a challenging moment. We face a crisis in mental health and our existing structures are overwhelmed by demand.

At the same time, we are equipped with new research on mental health, with the new resources and frameworks being developed by leaders and organizations like many of you gathered here—all available to us as we imagine the design of new structures to support the development of our young people. This work has deepened our understanding of this crisis and provided a context for us to better understand the unique concerns that students of color have related to mental health.

Today is an opportunity for us to draw upon the collective experience and knowledge in this room to determine what should come next: what needs to be a priority in our national conversation on mental health equity, and how can we bring these priorities to our conference in November?

What problems and possible solutions should we be focused on? What expertise, research, or further data would help in this work? What aspects of the landscape should we examine more closely to ensure the formation and flourishing of our students of color?

All of you have already contributed enormously to the work of answering these questions in our local region and beyond—I’m grateful to each of you for being here today to identify the aspects of this discussion we can carry forward into November. Thank you for your commitment to our young people … to their mental health … and to building campus communities that support their ability to flourish. I wish you the very best for a productive convening this morning.