The Giving Challenge 2022 is here!
SW Florida’s premier one-day giving event is aimed at encouraging individual philanthropy to nonprofits based in the region. Healthy Teens is once again taking part and we’re excited to have your support! The Giving Challenge 2022 will be held on Tuesday, April 26th at 12:00 PM through Wednesday, April 27th at 12:00 PM. All donations made on the day, up to $100, per donor, per organization, will be matched through the generosity of the Patterson Foundation.
Within the overall Giving Challenge theme of “Be the ONE”, the Healthy Teens theme this year is “Teen Throwback”! Get ready to get nostalgic as you remember what it was like being a teen (or even share your current experiences!).
With that in mind, we wanted to cast our minds back to the last Giving Challenge in 2020, and reflect on what we achieved collectively. With your support we raised over $10,000 (more than twice our initial target!), a huge vote of confidence in the power of peer education and mentoring to help youth make healthier decisions about their health and wellbeing.
The last Giving Challenge took place under extremely difficult circumstances, coming just after the arrival of a global pandemic that affected every single person in the world. What we have seen since is that the increased uncertainty and instability impacted our youth particularly hard. Even before the pandemic, over 33% of Florida youth said that they had felt sad or hopeless for an extended period of time, at least once in the previous year. Over 15% had purposefully hurt themselves, and another 15% had seriously considered suicide. Since Covid-19 affected every area of our lives, most mental health professionals in our region would agree that these shocking statistics are getting worse. Almost 70% of all Florida youth who suffer from a severe depressive episode, are unable to
The support that Healthy Teens received through the Giving Challenge 2020 has helped us achieve so much since. We were able to support an incredibly passionate and gifted group of teens to support their peers through virtual opportunities to connect. They turned to social media to provide messages of hope and support to those who needed to hear something positive and couldn’t connect in other ways. They never gave up on providing such critical information and mentoring so as many as they could.
We all had different experiences of being a teenager. Most of us would have experienced both positive and negative circumstances and events. At such a crucial period in their development from children into young adults, we believe that the power of peer education has never been more relevant to empowering youth to make healthy decisions and take action to lead success lives.
Would you help us, at this time, to grow our ability to support the mental and physical health of our youth? Head over our GC22 webpage for more information on how you can support us.!
