2024 DMV Youth Assembly on Mental Health
By several measures, the United States is undergoing a mental health crisis. This is especially true for young Americans, who are experiencing higher rates of anxiety, depression, emergency room visits, and self-harm, including suicide. Youth in America face an array of dangers, like bullying, sexual predators, gun violence, domestic violence, drugs, and else, yet collective youth deliberations are not commonly part of mental health or wider safety and security policy-making. For these reasons, Learning Life, a Washington DC-based educational nonprofit, is organizing a Youth Citizen Assembly on Mental Health (hereafter, “the Assembly”) for motivated DC area youth ages 12 to 25 to be able to come together, learn, deliberate and propose policy solutions that could help improve mental health for young people in the DC/DMV metro region.
Citizen assemblies bring people together to learn, deliberate and propose policy solutions to challenges they face. Such assemblies are held online and/or in-person, and have been used in a variety of countries, including the USA, to widen participation in policy-making at local to international levels in order to make government policies more representative of the informed views of their citizens.
The Assembly will occur on Saturday October 19, 1-3pm online, then in person the following Saturday, October 26, 1-5pm, 2024. The October 19 session is optional but strongly encouraged, and will focus on learning about mental health issues, trends and policies in preparation for the October 26 required in-person Assembly. You do not have to do any homework to participate.
Those youth selected for the Assembly will be guided in their learning and deliberation in both sessions by adult professional volunteers in the mental health and dialogue fields. Learning Life will invite local, state and federal government officials to attend the Assembly to listen to the students’ deliberations. The students’ policy conclusions will be written up and shared with all those participating, as well as government officials.
If the 2024 Assembly is successful, pending funding, Learning Life aims to make youth assemblies an annual or bi-annual event coinciding with DemFest, that works to give regular, public voice to DC area youth on issues and policies that affect them. This DMV youth assembly project is part of Learning Life’s wider DMV Democracy Learning Community, an association of DC area individuals and organizations working to make democracy more fun and inclusive by developing social events, products, services and spaces that entertain and nurture learning, networking, collaboration and wider, deeper citizen participation.