Thanks so much for coming into our school, and for the wonderful presentation! The students were engaged the whole time.

Starts With Me was a huge encouragement and provided the stepping blocks and pathway for myself as a teacher to seek opportunities to educate my students about mental health and well-being. Starts With Me interactively involved students to experience what the meaning of mental health is to them. I was able to then collaborate with Michael to create my course’s first Project Based Learning opportunity, where students created personal artifacts and reflection pieces about what mental health means to them and share it both within the school community and to the public with Starts With Me’s State Of Mind Festival.

Mike’s ‘Starts With Me’ presentation felt very genuine. The students were receptive to Mike because he talked personally about his own struggles. Students found this relatable and could see that mental health problems can happen to anyone and more importantly, that they are not alone.