At the high school where Marissa Garcia works as a mental health navigator, she manages a caseload of 20 to 40 students.
Each week, Garcia meets one-on-one with these students, who have been flagged for slipping attendance, low classroom engagement or another behavior that suggests they might benefit from regular support. She sits and talks with them, trying to understand the barriers that keep them from coming to school. She directs them to community resources for meeting basic needs, like food banks and public assistance programs. She listens to them — and relates to them — as they share the challenges of experiencing adolescence in the digital age.
What’s unique about Garcia is that, at 24, she is not many years removed from the students she’s serving on a daily basis. And that is by design.
Garcia is one of the 317 young people who served in the inaugural year of the Youth Mental Health Corps, a national service initiative that deploys “near-peer” mentors across communities with limited access to mental health resources.
The initiative comes as youth mental health has been at “crisis” levels for years now, with 2 in 5 high school students reporting they feel sad and hopeless and nearly 1 in 10 saying they have attempted suicide. At the same time, an estimated 132 million Americans, or about one-third, live in a community without adequate access to mental health resources, with a shortage of thousands of mental health specialists.
The Youth Mental Health Corps is an attempt to answer both challenges simultaneously. It aims to support middle and high school students who are experiencing, or may be at risk of, mental health challenges, while also giving recent high school and college graduates an opportunity to try on a career in behavioral health.
In its first year, corps members in four states — Colorado, Minnesota, Michigan and Texas — worked across 172 service sites and reached an estimated 16,000 students. In year two, which is currently underway, seven more states have joined the initiative: California, Iowa, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Utah and Virginia. Another seven states are actively planning to deploy corps members in the 2026-27 school year, bringing the total to 18.
Tracy Huebner, director of special programs and initiatives at WestEd, a nonpartisan research agency, was brought in earlier this year to evaluate the impact of the initial implementation of the Youth Mental Health Corps.
Already, she says, school leaders in participating sites have seen positive changes in the form of reduced behavioral referrals and improved student attendance. Students also seem to be benefitting from reduced stigma around mental health, as a growing number are proactively asking for help.
“Adults who supervised corps members saw their value add,” Huebner shares. “They are an extra set of eyes, an extra pair of hands, and just brought something to the environment that wasn’t there before.”
Corps members are in their late teens and early 20s, and their age proximity to the students they’re serving, she says, is a hallmark of the program. But so, too, is their understanding of the communities they serve. Garcia, for example, has spent her whole life in the same part of Colorado where she now works. Corps members placed in very rural areas tend to hail from rural areas themselves, Huebner adds.
This allows the mental health “navigators,” as corps members are called, to better connect with the students they’re serving. They are of the same generation, usually from the same geographic context, and often share some of the same lived experiences.
Garcia sees that come through in the “little things,” she says, such as a similar sense of humor.
“The way we connect feels more authentic,” she says. “That builds more trust. Some of the stuff I struggled with, they’re struggling with now. It’s very relatable, what they’re dealing with. Things like social media were an issue when I was in high school. It’s still very relevant to me.”
In her school, Garcia acts as a sort of first line of defense for students. She meets with them and determines whether they need to see a specialist, such as the school social worker or in-school therapist, or if they need help accessing resources in the community. Sometimes all they need is an empathetic ear to hear what they’re going through — social anxiety, academic pressure, whatever it may be — and Garcia is the only stop they need to make.
“The most acute experiences are not the same as struggling with feeling left out of friends online [or] anxiety that makes me not want to show up at school,” says Alise Marshall, senior director of corporate affairs and impact at Pinterest, one of the co-creators of the initiative. “There’s a continuum of needs, so there should be a continuum of care to meet those needs.”
Marshall adds: “This is not about supplanting educators or school counselors or others in more professional seats inside of schools. It’s about supplementing schools and community-based organizations and health clinics with additional supports.”
Indeed, Garcia believes her presence has offered a critical reprieve to colleagues working on mental health at her school.
“Our social worker and therapist are swamped,” she notes. “They may not have time to check in with students, find those kids who might slip through the cracks. I’ve been a lot of help with them. I’ve been able to navigate mental health crises on my own, without pulling in every other adult.”
Garcia has the skills and confidence to navigate those crises because of training she received from AmeriCorps, a key partner of the initiative. She learned mental health first aid and de-escalation strategies. She has also been taking relevant college courses in behavioral health, including ones on empathy, therapeutic communications, and case management, as part of the program.
The Youth Mental Health Corps model has a shared national framework for participating states to follow, but it’s highly customizable.
“The power of this model is it’s responsive to local needs … and contextualized by place,” says Marie Groark, managing director at the Schultz Family Foundation, another of the initiative’s co-creators.
Huebner conducted four case studies — one in each of the states participating in year one — that show four quite distinct iterations of the model. “It’s not one-size-fits-all,” she says. “This is a very organic model.”
As for the initiative’s effort to attract young people to careers in behavioral health, that seems to be a success, at least anecdotally. All four of the corps members Huebner followed will be pursuing careers in education or mental health. And Garcia just applied to graduate school for social work.
“I did not want to work in a school before this,” Garcia admits. “Now I don’t want to leave. It’s been a slow realization that this is what I want to do — the work I do in schools with mental health and basic needs for students. This is the path that I want to take.”
