We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Aayushi Mehta. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Aayushi below.
Aayushi, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?
As a child, I constantly saw many people around me struggle with their mental health. I initially thought that it was only my family who struggled with depression, anxiety, PTSD, etc. However, as I grew older, I started to learn that every single person around me was struggling in different ways, from finances, insecurities, deaths in families, etc. Despite this, mental health was not something that was openly spoken about or addressed, and there was no clear support for children.
One day in high school, a student posted on Facebook that he was struggling with his mental health and that he felt lost and alone. As I read his Facebook post, chills went up my back, and I immediately began thinking about what could be done to make sure no one felt this way ever again. Due to a lack of support and approval, it took months, but eventually, we were able to hold my high school’s first Mental Health Week. It consisted of therapeutic activity rooms, discussion rooms, and an assembly where students could get on stage and talk about their struggles with mental health and how they were able to overcome it to show others that things can and will get better. After this week, several students came up to me and talked about how the safe space helped them understand their past and also showed them that they had a community of people to whom they could speak to. This made me beyond happy, but I knew that my work wasn’t done there.
In college, I started up a non-profit organization, Project Yellow, which introduces mental health curriculum to children. The goal of our organization is to focus on preventative mental health education and care. We teach children about self-love, confidence, taking care of themselves and others, different mental illnesses, etc through our student-made, research-backed 45 minute mental health lesson plans. We spread our lessons through presenting to schools across Austin providing parents and teachers resources through our client facing website, and volunteering with hospitals and other volunteer opportunities with kids. Alongside this, students are educated on resources that are out there for them, who they can talk to, how they can bring up conversations regarding mental health, etc. I sincerely hope that if these children face challenging situations as they get older, they will be better equipped and supported, leading to a happier, healthier future. We have several more ideas to share our cause, but are hoping for funding to push those endeavors forward.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?
My name is Aayushi Mehta, and I am an undergraduate student at University of Texas at Austin, pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Human Development and Family Sciences, Bachelor of Business Administration in Marketing, and a Minor in Entrepreneurship. I am from Sugar Land, Texas, but was born in England and have lived in Ohio and Pennsylvania. I have always been super involved in leadership and assisting other local nonprofits and startups in formation and strategy. I am super passionate about mental health, women’s rights, and supporting animals that have been abused.
My passion for mental health awareness and working with kids led to the formation of Project Yellow. In Project Yellow, we have had the best community of supporters from the start. We have created a loving, comfortable, and exciting community. Although starting a new organization has been extremely stressful for myself and every officer/member involved, it has also been so rewarding. With people so passionate about the cause, so kind/down to earth, and so driven to constantly reach new heights, it has allowed us to keep going and not give up. It has also led us to reach so much success as in under 2 years alone we have networked with over 200 mental health professionals and guidance counselors, raised over $7000 dollars, and had over 140 officers/members/interns work with us to allow us to provide volunteering and impactful opportunities to high school and UT Austin students across Texas and assist 2000+ elementary school students with mental health.
I am the most proud about my interactions with the children from the schools we work with. At my last school visit, the kids came up to me afterwards and gave me the best hug and one kid said “I love you all, thank you for teaching us so much today, I had so much fun. When are you coming again?” This small message of appreciation and love, made my entire week and made me feel so proud and happy that kids are now receiving the love, care, and support that I wished I had received as a child. Even when working with small groups or entire classrooms, the engagement, answers, excitement that the kids bring, makes me feel so proud and happy. To have worked with over 2000 kids is beyond what I could have ever imagined and makes me so excited for the future of Project Yellow.
A takeaway from what we are doing is to make sure to spend the extra few moments with the children around us, whether it be your own kids, siblings, cousins, etc, and share constant love and support to make sure that they know they can speak to you. Our childhood is so vital to our development, and when kids are not supported as children, then when older the pain and struggles from their past affect so many aspects of their lives from academics, relationships with others, physical health, and psychological health.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
Starting a new non-profit organization during the virtual-pandemic world in December 2020 was extremely difficult. Myself and our team of 22 officers were working multiple hours every single day to bring about our idea and put out the best curriculum that is fully backed by research, build a social media presence, raise money, and network with professionals and schools to be able to share our work. However, with the massive covid restrictions and the stress that teachers already faced coming back, schools were not taking us in by allowing us to volunteer with them. We had emailed almost every single elementary school in Austin, and not one was ready to take us on. This was disappointing for our officers because they were constantly putting in so much work for the cause, but were not able to see the success. This led many officers to understandably step down and choose to pursue other organizations. This was a tricky time as we had to constantly boost morale and excitement amongst officers, where I as a president, did not even know the direction of the organization. There were discussions held where we almost changed the entire structure of the organization. Despite these struggles, myself and a few other officers from day one stayed committed to the mission and did not give up. Last semester, all at once, we had 5 schools agree to work with us and now have consistent relationships with schools who we visit each month and have been able to make such massive impacts. This has taught myself and others to never give up on something that they are passionate about. If we had given up back then in the beginning, then none of this would’ve happened. My mom used to use an analogy of a mountain, and how when climbing, we can’t see the view at the top, but once we get there, it is so worth it and fulfilling. Similarly, we often can’t see how close we are to success, but once you can make the impact, it all becomes worth it . You can learn from each situation and implement changes, but by staying committed and not giving up, success and impact will come.
How do you keep your team’s morale high?
Managing a team and maintaining high morale is extremely difficult. Especially with the fast pace of our world, it is difficult to keep people within your company/organization and to maintain good spirits. A few pieces of advice that I would give is first to always make sure that there is open communication within team members and between you and them. Open communication may entail letting one another know that there is a better solution, if they are going through a hard time and need a break, their boundaries or preferences in working together, inability to meet deadlines, etc. By making this comfortable and open environment, there is psychological safety that each person holds. In Project Yellow, we have implemented this. At the start of our leadership cycle we had everyone fill out documents that shared personal preferences within leadership(time that are free/busy, leadership style, form of communication they prefer, strengths/weaknesses, etc). Whenever officers are working together and conflict arises we make them take personality and leadership assessments to understand themselves and each other as leaders and people. They can then discuss moving forward how they can be better supported by one another. Second, I have learned that it is always better to communicate things in-person or by talking it out. With this technology filled-word, many of our conversations are from email, text-message, groupme, etc. When conversing in this way, the opportunity for a face-to-face or voice-to-voice bond or understanding is lost. Many times simple things can be misunderstood without showing body language or tone cues, and so whenever possible I would recommend in-person or call interactions. Finally, I would recommend creating a bond with your team. Recently, in project yellow, I could tell that a few officers were beginning to feel less motivated/excited. Thus, we held a mini culture workshop to go over our values and then held an officer social. Everyone attended the social and it allowed us to build stronger bonds with another. Afterwards, there was more excitement amongst the officers and strengthened motivation.
Contact Info:
Each school visits materials, transportation, and recruiting materials have been extremely costly. We want to expand to reach more schools, upgrade our website so it is more functional, and create an app with fun ways to teach children about mental health; However, as a new organization, it has been difficult to fund our initiatives or find long term donors. Thus, we would love any support that we could receive, such as monetary donations, physical donations(print outs, posters, stickers, and other materials), spreading our cause and mission, and connecting us with anyone that can further our reach. If you would like to support us in any way, our email, gofundme, venmo, and other social media are down below!
- Personal Email: aayushi.d.mehta.19@gmail.com
- Organization Email: projectyellow.org@gmail.com
- GoFundMe:https://www.gofundme.com/f/76ngz-project-yellow?utm_campaign=p_cf+share-flow-1&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=customer
- Venmo: @projectyellowtexas
- Website: https://projectyellowtechn.wixsite.com/my-site
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/projectyellowtexas/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Projectyellowtexas
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/projectyellow/
This years officer team:
Vice-Presidents: Kareena Sharma, Christine Nguyen, Sruthi Tekkalur
Executive Officers: Hiruni Dissanayake, Kelly Miller, Iman Shah, Gabriella Montemayor, Lizzie Pittman, Sruthi Gade, Misha Gupta, Geethika Bonthala, Anjali Narayanan, Malina Patel
Image Credits
Brady Landers