YAAS: Mental Health Awareness Month

If you want to learn about the original conception and mission of this program, read my What is YAAS? post. TL;DR: It's a weekly group for youth age 14-24 where we'll be doing community service work, library programs, hosting guest presenters, and making connections with peers in a safe and welcoming environment.

Today's program was originally going to be a presentation/guided exercises based on info from TeenMentalHealth.org. I had the best of intentions, but alas, actual physical health intervened and I got a kidney infection. I called out sick yesterday, and today I was in too much pain to plan an instructional program. And so, I tried to stay in the spirit of Mental Health Awareness Month and practice a little self forgiveness. Instead of trying to throw together a half-baked program at the last minute, I changed gears and made it a free play night of board games, snacks, and intricate coloring pages meant for teens or adults. 

I wasn't able to get any pictures of the activities, because I got caught up playing and talking with our awesome YAAS members, including some brand new ones. We even discussed the irony of me not being able to produce a health program because of my health, and had a good giggle over it. So, life lessons were explored during our impromptu "family game night," after fruit snacks but before a game of Pictionary that ended up involving almost all 20 people who were in the room tonight. I wasn't sure how tonight would go since I've never done something so unstructured and off-the-cuff with this group before, but it went really well and they seemed to have fun!