Dear Brain Health Bootcamp supporters,
Happy Halloween! I hope everyone enjoyed Halloweekend, costumes, and trick-or-treating!
This past month we made some major strides at Brain Health Bootcamp, but as with any early-stage organization, we also experienced some challenges. Here’s a quick recap:
New Brain Health Bootcamp Website ✨
We’ve learned a lot about how teachers and schools find, vet, and adopt mental health programming. In order to better communicate our mission, product, and school solution, we’ve rebuilt our website from the ground up. Our new website showcases our school solution to measure and increase mental health literacy, what students learn, the research behind our programming, sample content, and how to bring BHB to your school. The website also includes several new pages focused on supporters (like you!) – we now feature our monthly impact reports, and have clarified our giving options (recurring gift, partnership, memorial fund). Our goal is to empower any teacher, school admin, or supporter to quickly learn about what we do and take action to support our work.
Brain Health Basics
What we previously called the Intro Program has now been rebranded as Brain Health Basics. We’ve reimagined our one-hour intervention and rebuilt it from the ground up with better videos, better visuals, and clearer impact measurements. Brain Health Basics is the fastest way for schools to teach students the basics of mental health and increase mental health literacy in just one class period. This new program is the culmination of tremendous teamwork and we’re very excited to see how it resonates with students and teachers. If you have a spare hour, we would love your feedback!
Here’s a note from Grace, a 10th grader from Buffalo NY, who took Brain Health Basics this past month:
“I enjoyed this program because it gave me a better understanding about stress, stigma and other topics. I learned that a mental disorder shouldn't be something to be ashamed of and it's best to talk to someone when needed.”
Our Current Challenges
As with any organization attempting a 10x (!!!) YoY growth rate, we are experiencing some growing pains. One challenge has been transitioning from supporting schools and teachers with Zoom meetings and human conversations to supporting them virtually with our website, support resources, and self-service app.
In order to hit our 10,000 student goal with our team of 5, we must scale our team’s capacity without diluting the resonance and efficacy of our programming. We’re in the process of rebuilding our school onboarding process to be more actionable and automated. We believe that many teachers searching for mental health resources want to take action immediately, and that eliminating any delays in accessing our programming will help us support schools in their moments of need while also scaling our capacity.
We think that our a-ha moment is when a health teacher can see students completing the programming and can watch as the mental health literacy stats increase in their Dashboard. Getting more instructors to this a-ha moment is our primary focus over the next month.
How You Can Help
If you believe in our mission and want to continue supporting our work, please consider making a commitment to this year’s budget. We’re still seeking gifts at the $25k, $50k, and $100k levels to get us to our $500k goal this year.
If we can reach 10,000 students this year with a $500k budget, we’ll be making impact at $50/student. A $50k gift would help 1,000 students get access to mental health literacy.
None of this work would be possible without supporters like you. I personally am so grateful to have the time, space, and team to make an impact on adolescent mental health in memory of Chase and for all kids struggling. As always, please reach out to me with any questions or comments – I would love to have a conversation.
See you next month,
Bryce
