TELL would like to thank Akai Hane Kyodo Bokinkai for the generous grant in aid of youth mental health in 2023-2024 as part of their program to “support people with roots in foreign countries with activities to create connections.”

With this project, we were able to reach out to a number of different parts of the international community in Japan, who were supporting youth. We offered three types of workshops. 

We visited four schools and spoke with students directly, telling them about the Lifeline, Childline, and other mental health services, and encouraged them to take care of their mental health and reach out for help if they needed to. We visited: The German School of Tokyo/Yokohama, Salesian International School in Tokyo, Canadian Academy in Kobe, and Osaka YMCA International School in Osaka. 

We offered four public workshops to youth and those supporting youth. These were: Psychological First Aid to educators and NPO workers in Noto, in the aftermath of the earthquake, who were worried about the students they served; a workshop on mental health for LGBTQIA* youth; a workshop on the Hague Convention and the effect of family separation on children; and a workshop on gender creative parenting and supporting parents and children with diverse genders. 

We also offered the Question Persuade Refer suicide prevention gatekeeper training. We led four workshops for people supporting youth: two for educators and peer gatekeepers, and two for NPOs serving at-risk youth. We held one in Kobe, two in Tokyo, and one in Okinawa, reaching a mixture of teachers, administrators, peer gatekeepers, and NPO workers supporting queer youth, those in institutional care, and those needing extra educational support.