Alliance Update: The following comes from our friend Mental Health America’s Senior Director, Policy and Advocacy Caren Howard. Please reply today!
Urge Your Members of Congress to Move the SUPPORT Act Forward!
Mental Health America’s youth leaders are asking you to tell Congress to enact the SUPPORT Act with four provisions that can help advance youth peer support. You can find the link to our action alert, a graphic to promote, and language you can use or adapt here. Please share far and wide, as each submission matters and our success on this is in our numbers! Don’t forget to take the alert yourself as well!
ALERT LINK: https://mhanational.salsalabs.org/youthpeersupportactionalert/index.html
Here’s the background
The SUPPORT Act has the potential to create monumental changes for peer support nationwide as it includes language to 1) create grants for peer-to-peer programs in high schools, 2) reauthorize a federal peer support technical assistance center, 3) collect vital data on youth peer services in Medicaid, and 4) codify the Office of Recovery at SAMHSA to promote lived experience.
Despite the youth mental health crisis being at an all-time high, many young people are forced to go without needed support. Young people deserve access to high-quality, community-based peer support services, with the SUPPORT Act providing a key opportunity to finally answer the unmet needs of youth nationwide.
Mental health is a bipartisan issue, with youth across the nation leading advocacy efforts to demand peer support services that would save the lives of their friends, classmates, and community members. We are asking you to not let them down.
Please join Mental Health America in sending a letter to your U.S. Senators and House Representatives to ensure youth peer support policies are quickly passed as part of the SUPPORT Act.
ALERT LINK: https://mhanational.salsalabs.org/youthpeersupportactionalert/index.html