Letters of Encouragement

Amelia describes her organize an activity in her own words:

For my organize an activity I wanted to host a mental health awareness night at my church. Over the past few years I’ve become very aware of a lack of discussion around mental health at the church I go to. I wanted to set up a night to give a presentation about mental illness but also managing a good mental health overall. I talked to some of the moms and learned they never teach their kids about mental health (I’m the only one who isn’t homeschooled there). I got support from one of the pastors but the other pastor told me I couldn’t host this. I could’ve found a different venue but it was really difficult and when I asked, many people said it would be too inconvenient to drive somewhere else.

I still wanted to impact the other teens in my youth group and knew they needed encouragement to make their faith and beliefs their own, know they are appreciated and loved, and I wanted to thank them for their impact on me. To make it more personal and individual, I decided to write cards to each person in my youth group. I wrote 38 cards and each of them was very specific to that person and my relationship with them.

Writing them made my appreciation and admiration increase even more for these beautiful people but it also saddened me to know many of them feel the lack of support with figuring out their own beliefs. When I passed them out some of them read them in front of me and many of them cried and hugged me. It also started many conversations and I was able to help them with some questions they had. Some of them read their cards later and texted me long messages either thanking me or starting conversations about the contents of the cards.

While my only hope for this was to encourage them and hopefully plant that seed of letting them know they can have their own beliefs, it made me so happy that it not only did that but also started many conversations about it.

Here are Amelia’s tips for YOU if you are thinking about something similar:

If you’re set on an idea for your activity, try to be flexible and use creativity to make changes to plans if some things don’t work out.
Never be afraid to go to the professor/mentor for help, they are totally willing to help.
If you do something that may cause disagreement between you and other people, be sure to be kind and approach it with compassion and acknowledge and respect the other people even if you don’t agree with them.
Keep in mind that if you have multiple ideas, you can focus on one for this class but the other ideas are still things you can do. Ethics doesn’t have to be confined to ethics class and it shouldn’t, so neither should making a difference.
Give yourself plenty of extra time and spread out your activity if you can because life gets busy at the end of the semester.
Don’t let discouragement stop you from wanting to make a difference.
If you choose an activity you’re passionate about it makes it more fun and doesn’t seem like an assignment as much.
Specifically if you do something involving education, then make sure you are very educated on the topic because spreading incorrect information can cause a lot of harm, especially with mental health and mental illness.