Engaged minds, Empowered Lives: Cultivating Child Mental Health Awareness Through Civic Engagement and Service Learning

ongoing

The general objective of the project is to cultivate child mental health awareness and promotion of good mental health habits and activities through Civic Engagement and Service-Learning in rural areas of Romania and Kosovo. Partners, New Horizons Foundation (Romania) and TOKA (Kosovo), will work with the University of Prishtina's Department of Psychology (Kosovo) to engage 300+ school children from 20 rural and economically low locations from Romania and Kosovo. The ELEM project will raise awareness of child mental health, promote positive parenting, and enhance community engagement, supported by five public institutions. Objectives include acquiring data on factors affecting children’s mental health, upgrading an educational model (called IMPACT) to tackle prevention of mental health, training of 40 educators, give impulses to more than 150 parents, promoting children's rights and active engagement, empowering children to champion mental health though Service Learning projects with the local community, enhancing educators' skills, and lifting the visibility of children's mental health agency. The project's key activities cover project management, research, curriculum development, self-assessment tools adaptations, training for educators, laboratories for parents, implementation of 20 child lead clubs, Service Learning projects implementations, impact, evaluation and dissemination. We will also organize local and international events to shed light on mental health and we will implement the Most Significant Change qualitative evaluation approach asa participatory research approach. Expected outcomes include the enhanced capacity of partners, educators, and children to address mental health needs via child lead IMPACT Clubs, and the development of tools for implementing child participation models to tackle mental health challenges.