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!

YAAS: "Holes" Movie Night and T-Shirt Tie Dye

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.

Tonight was a very special night of YAAS. A while back, we had a t-shirt design contest to determine what the YAAS emblem would be. 

These were the designs submitted...

And after voting, this is what was voted in as our official group shirt design!

We ended up going with a black and white version

I spent my downtime at work ironing on the designs for the last couple of weeks so the kids wouldn't have to take the time to do it, and could focus on tie-dying. The logic behind this was, everyone's shirt will be both uniform and individual; same icon, different tie-dye patterns and colors. A group, but still individuals.

In order to make the tie-dying easy and accessible for everyone, we combined the project with a movie night and then had 2-3 people at a time come outside to dye their shirts. "Holes" is one of my all-time favorite movies of any genre, and when we talked about potential movies to show at YAAS it came up as a choice everyone would enjoy. If you haven't seen it or read the book by Louis Sachar, I highly recommend both. In fact, the movie is on my [very, very short] list of book-to-movie adaptations that was actually well done.

Here are some pictures of the tie-dye process...

...and here we all are a few weeks later at a YAAS outing wearing our fantastic group shirts!