“I’m for mental health. I’m in therapy right now, I was in therapy a few years ago. It is so important.”

Advocating for better mental healthcare for Black men and boys is always on the top of Emmanuel Jackson’s mind. As a college counselor at Muchin College Prep and as a Black man himself, he often sees his Black male scholars struggle much in the same way he did growing up.

“I knew I had to play my role and be a voice for our Black male scholars, particularly because I am a Black male and have been a Black male scholar in the past,” Jackson said, “It’s tough. They’ve been through a lot. They’re gonna continue to go through a lot.”

For him, getting mental healthcare and community support was a game changer. Now, he wants the same for his students.

“We wanna make sure that, as they go through these obstacles, they are getting the supports that they need and that they have healthy and constructive ways to express themselves,” Jackson said.

These are the thoughts and feelings that propelled Jackson to jump on the Black Boys Collaborative group last spring. He took the lead with his fellow educators, Yolanda Hanna and Kameshia Ward from Hansberry College Prep, to create a new event for all our campuses at Noble Schools this year — “Black Boys Heal: See Me, Hear Me”.

The focus of the events is to provide space and resources for our Black boys to talk about mental health and how they can access care. The events have kicked off this month and will run into March. For this event, Jackson and his other collaborators partnered with a local non-profit organization – The CornerStore Chicago.

The CornerStore is a non-profit focused on helping youth access culturally-relevant and empowering mental healthcare, led and founded by Michelle Thompkins.

During the event, Thompkins and her colleague PJ Walker will be engaging in discussion with our boys around several topics. They’ll be teaching about the importance of mental health and inviting students to journal and practice mindfulness. They’re also bringing in several Black male guest speakers from a multitude of backgrounds from clinicians to community organizers to talk with our boys about mental health.

“The guests are brought in with the intention to highlight and celebrate Black men who create safe spaces for Black men/boys and their wellness,” Thompkins said, “Based on their expertise and experiences as Black men, they support the conversation.”

Like Jackson said, our Black boys have been through a lot. Every day, they deal with the mental, physical, and socioeconomic burdens of systemic racism and discrimination. Some of our Black boys experience poverty and food & housing insecurity. Many have witnessed violence in their communities. All of them carry the heavy weight of what society says about them.

“Historically, Black male bodies have been a target or seen as a threat or as something other than who they are,” Thompkins said, “I’ve heard teachers, admin, and even clinicians using labels and language that painted children from communities that I come from or from people who look like me as though they were deviant, thug, and criminals before they had even finished graduating from high school.”

Our Black boys continue to bring brilliance, innovation, and joy into our spaces despite all of these obstacles that they face. However, their invisible struggle with mental health has often remained unseen and unaddressed.

The stigma and inaccesibility of mental healthcare for the Black community, especially for men, makes it difficult for our boys to develop healthy coping skills and find much-needed community support to take care of their mental health.

“It is telling in our current status right now as a community just how much our Black men and our Black boys need the additional support and safe space,” Thompkins said.

At Noble, we’ve seen how this is impacting our boys. We’ve seen it in their grades, in their actions, and in their disengagement with school. We knew that addressing mental health was an essential part of our mission to improve the school experience for our Black boys.

“I just want our scholars to have strong strategies to cope and resources,” Jackson said, “I’m hoping that Noble as an organization will continue to have resources and bring supports to the school. And not only just bring supports, but that our scholars will want to take advantage of those support systems. And that, over time, we see better outcomes for our Black students both in GPA, in culture, and relationship building. That’s my main goal and focus.”

Noble Schools was grateful to be able to connect with Thompkins and The CornerStore to bring in some of those strong supports – and hopefully ones that will continue to grow at our campuses.

She started by sitting down with schools and holding forums in 2018. She talked to teachers and families about how they would want a mental health organization to better support their students. From those talks, she built The CornerStore’s approach to mental health: bringing in culturally-relevant resources and healthy creative outlets to help youth heal and make decisions to better their lives.

“There was an emerging crisis where I felt like we really needed to redefine how we could meet our youth where they’re at,” Thompkins said about the rising rate of suicide for youth in 2018, “So, the way that we connect with youth is by using culture.”

Thompkins says she tries to understand what students are interested in and then curates her mental health conversations to each unique student and school community – like the See Me, Hear Me activity she’s using in Noble schools. She says she also tries to bring back some of the cultural and ancestral healing practices that the Black community has used for centuries. She also spoke on how her programming emphasizes the importance and need of community.