Struggle Buddies: Our school project

We talked to three students at Garforth Academy who have been working hard in their school on a mental health and well-being project called Struggle Buddies. They also ran a MindMate Awareness stall with students during a busy lunchtime.

I think MindMate were a good partner for our project about supporting children’s mental health. I’ve enjoyed the teamwork and the stall was very hectic but I think we got a lot of responses about how kids want us to help them. If we start at school with our students we can help kids outside of our school too. I think we had a fun stall and the kids in school enjoyed answering the question ‘How can our school help with your mental health’

Harry Smith Year 8

Struggle Buddies means a lot to me, and I feel like I really relate to our idea.  Working with MindMate as a partner has been great! Mental health means so much to me and it should never be overlooked, every single day children go through things and don’t tell anyone…no one should ever struggle in silence which is why I think struggle buddies is so important so we can break the norm, and make it so people want to talk about their feelings. Everyone should be loved and everyone deserves the same amount of help as any one else. I enjoyed working on the stall a lot in school, we have a lot of research now so we can go and find how to help students in our school.

Niamh  Year 8

To me the Struggle Buddies our NextGenLeaders project is important because mental health is something people don’t really care about enough, especially young people.  Mental poor health can lead to many bad things like suicide or suicide thoughts or attempts so doing things like the MindMate stall at our school means so much to me, we can help our school with whoever needs the help, the research we got can help us decide our next steps. I  loved working with MindMate  and doing the stall with them, just now knowing what we can try do to change how people want us to help them with their mental health. I’d like to carry on doing it and make little changes into bigger ones.

Laila Year 8

Find out more about setting up a MindMate Ambassador project in your school