What is Hope Squad?

So Hope Squad is a peer to peer suicide intervention group, and it helps to reduce the stigma behind mental health and help promote healthy conversation among youth and our peers.

How does Hope Squad work exactly?

So Hope Squad is completely student based.

It's peer to peer, so trusted students are voted by their peers and then we go through and we vet the kids and we figure out who might be a good fit and who is dedicated to promoting positive mental health and breaking the stigma.

So I was nominated as somebody that if someone were to have a mental health crisis, they would feel comfortable coming to me as a person to talk to me about it.

And then I'm then trained on how to handle such a situation if I am ever having to deal with it.

How is Hope Squad's approach different from other approaches.

So the thing that I really love about Hope Squad is that it kind of takes the focus away from the school counselors or the adults being the ones that are completely trustworthy and shifting it to the kids and I feel like kids are more likely to talk to other kids if they're struggling.

How has Hope's Squad benefited students?

I think that Hope Squad has benefited students because on our campus at least, they know that they have people to go to.

We wear shirts every Thursday so they know who the members are inside of Hope Squad, the students and the adults that are there.

They know that we're trained and they're able to come to us easily.

And another thing that Hope Squad focuses on is not just the students that are struggling, but also different social emotional skills and overall connectedness of the school community, and I think mental health affects all of us and it's something that we can find as a common ground, and so I felt like this was the best way to do that.

Is there any final thoughts that you want to give on or about Hope Squad?

I think a final thought that I have is that I think that this program is a really good start here.

We just started this year, and I think that we're going to grow and were going to progress all throughout Vista, and I hope to see it in more schools because it is a really good program for peers and it helps to promote a lot of healthy things.

If we can get this in every school around Nevada, we can start training our kids to talk about this early on as we move forward and as we make it a bigger program, it's going to continue to just bring everybody together and really help to reduce suicide and suicide attempts not only at Vista, but around the valley.