COMMUNITY OF WELLNESS
The need for free, high-quality, mental health services has always been significant for LGBTQIA+ communities, especially queer and trans youth of color (QTYOC). Our evidence-informed expansion strategy to scale service access and effectiveness for young people with focus on QTYOC that is intentionally anti-racist was developed on the following tenets:
- Build a community of care serving tens of thousands of youth—virtually or in person at HMI—and exponentially more through a robust network of mental health practitioners trained within the HMI delivery model.
- Support community of care through investment in our own in-house services to help young people minimize interactions with oppressive and harmful systems.
- Create more inclusive systems of healthcare by leveraging the increased scale of impact to influence federal, state, and local funding allocations toward mental health.
MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES THAT WORK
Our 2022 program evaluation provides positive evidence that HMI’s mental health programming is decreasing depression and anxiety levels among young people.
- A statically significant decrease in anxiety and depression are achieved through wrap around programming specifically targeting LGBTQIA+ youth of color.
- We are the only organization providing and demonstrating impact for this demographic.
- The number of hours required to achieve the decrease in anxiety and depression would take years to access in traditional health care models.
ADDRESSING THE GROWING NEED FOR WELLNESS SERVICES
Over the past two years, we have doubled the size of its counseling team to accommodate the increase in requests for care. The waiting list for youth seeking care continues to grow despite the increase in staff.
We are developing a dynamic network of service providers in other youth serving organizations and advocating for an expanded view of care interventions with funders.
Click on the image to view or download our Community of Wellness literature for a more detailed overview.
INNOVATING AND EXPANDING FOCUS
We are working to transform how queer youth access care by expanding upon what we have successfully been doing for over four decades. Providing free and long-term care with no legal/identity or payment requirements will help reduce or eliminate the inconsistent and inadequate treatment of queer youth, often resulting from Medicaid barriers.
IMPROVED SPACE UTILIZATION
Providing services in a community setting that centers the youth and that can accommodate growth to better serve a broad age range.
TRAINING
We have long been a training resource for youth service providers globally. Our proven and scalable service model will allow us to provide training resources for mental health providers; influence the practice of mental health and wellness to be more inclusive of LGBTQIA+ youth; and build a pipeline of LGBTQIA+ practitioners.