By Genoa Barrow | OBSERVER Senior Staff Writer
A locally based organization is reaching boys and men of color where they’re at, using a multimedia approach to addressing mental health and wellness.
Mental Health California, a community nonprofit, spearheads its Brother Be Well program, a blend of awareness, innovation, education, and healing pathways designed to reduce disparities and disrupt prolonged suffering. Membership and access to online content is open to males 13 and older. Individuals, schools and community-based groups also can register. Brother Be Well also hosts a summer workshop program.
The OBSERVER spoke to founder and director Kristene Smith about the campaign’s work and reach.
Q: How have the Brother Be Well offerings made an impact?
A: We have a large impact, at least we think we do. We are a multimedia mental health awareness platform. Mainly it’s rooted in our blog. We have videos, podcasts and articles that reside at Brotherbewell.com/blog. In about spring of 2020, we set out to create 60 articles, 60 videos and 60 podcasts just to get the conversations going about mental health and males of color. We ended up with over 500 pieces of media. We’re still in production right now doing a new series called “Into the Classroom,” which will take information and education into classrooms.
We’ve grown to around 30,000 subscribers to the blog and we have representation all across the United States. There are people from seven or eight different countries who subscribe to the blog.
As far as the impact on the young men of color who may be coming into one of our summer sessions or something like that, we ask for their feedback and in some cases, it’s been really life-altering for some of them. They signed up not really knowing much about Brother Be Well. They’re getting stipends and they’re going to workshops and they’re like, “OK, this is pretty cool.” But then after a while they’re telling stories, they’re making friends, they’re getting down to mental health, trauma, adverse childhood experiences, drug abuse, substance use, all kinds of family issues, anxiety, depression – they’re just talking about some very serious subjects that they have not had a chance to speak about, especially in a virtual environment with only males of color.
Q: What can participants expect from these summer sessions?
A: Our Summer Academy is around 15 youth, all males of color, around 18 to 26. Our clinicians are all males of color. The hosts are all males of color. The mentors are all males of color. Everyone has lived experiences. They’ve been through something – at least some trauma, maybe some substance use and recovery. They have managed conditions and that could be depression, could be anxiety, whatever it is. Everybody’s the same and they really get a lot out of that. We’ve seen a lot of growth with some of the young men who then come back for other programs or to be on a podcast. Looking at those testimonials, it’s telling us that we are really making an impact, which tells us we’re doing the work, and then they can go and do some more work in their communities and spread the word. We’re really happy about that. We’re just proud of our young men for being so vulnerable.
Q: Have you faced any challenges in trying to meet the mental health needs of Black men?
A: No. We think we’re doing a good job in terms of answering questions and presenting information that they can easily digest. There’s a lot of dialogue, so they come away with their questions answered and definitely more enlightened. We’re not doctors or clinicians and we don’t provide direct services. We don’t set out to meet those kinds of needs. They have to get with a culturally competent therapist if they want to have a certain mental health need met that a therapist can deal with. But in terms of the education, most definitely, we feel like we’re meeting their needs.
Q: Is there enough focus on funding and meeting the specific needs of Black men?
A: No. There’s never enough. That’s one of the reasons that we created Brother Be Well, because there was such a need. My older brother has mental health challenges. All of our team members bring lived experience. There just isn’t enough conversation and definitely there isn’t enough funding. However, there are some creative approaches that we’ve seen at the national level, and with ONTRACK Program Resources here in Sacramento that has some work with the county as well and its Black men’s mental health group. I think what has to happen is there needs to be obviously more funding, but then there needs to be some quality proposals that can respond to funding opportunities. My Brother’s Keeper has a new podcast that they’re doing. So with the funding that is available, we just need to be able to spend it more creatively, but [we] have to propose more avenues to get more funding and more dedicated funding to the males of color for what we do. And I think youth of color in general, because it’s just such a lack of conversations in families, you just don’t hear about mental health and these kinds of things when you’re growing up.
Q: How do you outreach to young Black boys around mental health?
A: We have over 30,000 subscribers to our blog – that’s one of the main tools that we use – and we have school partnerships as well as community partnerships. When we put something out, like when we announce for the summer program, or we have a new graphic novels project, or we’re doing these videos for “Into the Classroom,” we usually get around six times the responses that we can use, six times is the amount of people applying to get into the summer program than we can actually serve. It’s 10 weeks and it’s 40 workshops that they’re in at a minimum. Plus, they have extra things to do with us. They’re giving feedback constantly, so we can create recommendations to districts on how to improve their mental health programs for this population. Unfortunately we aren’t able to service everyone because of our budget.
Q: What do we see as the top needs of this population?
A: Trauma interventions would be one of the top ones. Anxiety, there’s a lot of school stress, there’s a lot of racial stress, there’s different things that they’re going through, and probably some depression. And then big, big, big is the substance use. It could be minor, it could be major. It just goes from person to person, but it seems like all of them have been exposed in some way to substances, pretty much 100% of our audience. There might be a couple of them who’ve never really partaken, but they’ve been offered; they’ve been around it. And a good number of them have indulged in substances, and it wouldn’t be uncommon for it to be in their families. We have a few of them who have been removed from their homes because of substances and things like that. So that’s one of the reasons that we started doing more on substance use education, because they go hand in hand. It’s a cover for trauma. And it’s a cover for the self-medicating behaviors, to get away from something that’s not being dealt with.
For more information, visit brotherbewell.com.
This article is part of the Senior Staff Writer Genoa Barrow’s special series, “Head Space: Exploring The Mental Health Needs of Today’s Black Men.” The project is being supported by the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism and is part of “Healing California,” a yearlong reporting Ethnic Media Collaborative venture with print, online and broadcast outlets across California. The Sacramento OBSERVER is among the collaborative’s inaugural participants.
Support for this Sacramento OBSERVER article was provided to Word In Black (WIB) by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. WIB is a collaborative of 10 Black-owned media that includes print and digital partners.