How we fostered a safe and collaborative environment for youth mental health innovation

Before running the youth fellowship sessions, we conducted an envisioning kickoff workshop with the youth fellows to actively involve them in the design of the programme. This allowed us to tailor our sessions based on the insights gathered during the kickoff, and equip the youth participants with skills to run their sessions in the future.

We organised four youth fellowship sessions, bringing together speakers and organisations in the mental well-being and youth sector to share their insights and connect with youth fellows:
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Session 1: The Mindful Revolution: Exploring mental health opportunities in the digital world
Prof Daniel Fung is the Chief Executive Officer of the Institute of Mental Health and a Senior Consultant with the Department of Developmental Psychiatry. He is also Programme Director of the Ministry of Health’s Community Mental Health Team for children and adolescents (REACH).

Theodoric Chew is the CEO of Intellect – a modern-day mental health company with a mission to make mental healthcare and wellbeing support accessible for everyone in Asia Pacific. 

Janice Weng is the Deputy Director of MOH Office for Healthcare Transformation - an agile unit with the mandate to take an experimental and evidence based approach to redesigning healthcare in Singapore.

Vrinda Khanna is a business strategist and co-founder of MAGES Studio – a Singapore-based company that leverages emerging technologies such as AR, VR & Gamification to build meaningful solutions backed by learning pedagogies, driven by measurable impact.

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Session 2 - The Mental Health Market: Creating Offline Products People Actually Want
Sherman Ho is a co-founder of the Happiness Initiative with the goal of making wellbeing accessible to everyone.

Samantha Quek is the co-founder of Cupplets Creative and an experienced Art Therapist with a passion for integrating sensorial experiences into therapy.

Tiziana Tan is the CEO and founder of Brain Juice Collective, a purpose-driven ecosystem spanning impact consulting, marketing, education and innovation. She is passionate about helping brands lead conversations that connect deeply with their target audience by empowering them with the ideas, tools and strategies to create meaningful impact that’s integrated and profitable.

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Session 3: The Art of Digital Storytelling: How to Capture Hearts and Minds
Adeline Tay is a content creator at Our Grandfather Story –  a digital publisher dedicated to uncovering timeless and overlooked stories across Southeast Asia.

Nicholas Lee is the Executive Director of the Resilience Collective, a mental health charity that aims to drive meaningful dialogue based on equal partnerships between peers and society, building inclusivity and removing the damaging mentality of “us and them.”

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Eugene Soh is the founder of  Dude Studios, a creative Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) studio, as well as Mind Palace, a social enterprise that focuses on uplifting the lives of elderly patients with dementia.

‍Ron Yap a Mental Health Content Creator, Writer, Advocate, and Psychoeducator. He started @mentalhealthceo on Instagram, a mental health advocacy and destigmatization page with over 260k followers as of December 2023.

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Session 4: From Me to Us: Building and Motivating a Team of Advocates
Tricia Tan is the founder of mindline.sg, a national digital mental health programme that provides tools, tips and resources to   help you understand and manage your health and wellbeing.

Rahayu Mahzam is the Senior Parliamentary Secretary Ministry of Health & Ministry of Law. She is a lawyer by profession that specialised in civil litigation and family law. 

David Chua is the CEO of National Youth Council and Chairman of the Board of *SCAPE. *SCAPE aims to create additional opportunities for young SIngaporeans to Dream It, Live It. Opportunities to discover new pathways, acquire new perspectives and knowledge, and connect to communities and networks that can deepen their growth

Phua Chun Yat is the Chief Operating Officer of Samaritans of Singapore, a non-profit  that is dedicated to providing confidential emotional support to individuals facing a crisis, thinking about or affected by suicide.

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These sessions also featured hands-on elements to help apply learnings to their ongoing mental health projects.

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Experiential Learning Through Engaging Elements

Each session adopted an experiential learning approach, where participants learned by experiencing. By incorporating engaging elements related to well-being, we ensured that the learning experience was memorable and practical. In each session, we featured a partner with a unique specialisation. These partners included a tea bar showcase, virtual digital mental health applications, scent bars, and live poetry. These didn’t just demonstrate the diverse forms in which mental well-being can be nurtured but also made these elements interactive and hands-on, which fostered better engagement with our youth participants.

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Hands-on Workshops

We made use of multiple hands-on workshops for participants to take part in related to mental health. These included a Metaverse Workshop, Edible Cookie Painting with an Art Therapist, Mental Health Card Games with Creators, and a Social Media Workshop with a local influencer, @thementalhealthCEO.

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Community-driven Approach

By actively involving youth in the design and running of the sessions, we built a deeper connection and memorability. Apart from a kick-off workshop we ran with the youth, we conducted polls, asking them to rank their preferred speakers and workshop topics which served as the foundation for structuring our sessions. 

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Following each session, we also collected comprehensive feedback from the youth participants to be applied in subsequent sessions. 

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The collaborative programme meaningfully engaged partners and individuals in the community as well, such as Mages Institute, The Happiness Initiative and Cupplets Creative.

In our final sessions, we curated a Mental Health Showcase run by our fellows and youth leaders who are making a difference through their projects.

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