 I'm Georgie Westway and I'm currently a JMHS Strong Young Minds champion. I'm currently in year 10 and I've been a champion for nearly two years now. What is Strong Young Minds? Strong Young Minds is a group of people in Herefordshire who are working to raise the awareness of mental health and help reduce the stigma around mental health and there are many groups across Herefordshire who are taking part in making a difference. So how and why did you first get involved with the Strong Young Minds project? So the Strong Young Minds project store had been running for a year at my school. I'd seen what they'd been doing and I wanted to get in on the action. One of the main reasons I wanted to do it is because I wanted to find out more about mental health and I wanted to be able to help people including myself in the future and others who were suffering with it at the moment or in the future. And why do you think it's important to engage young people in your school and to hear what they've got to say? I think it's very important to engage young people in schools because they need to know that they aren't alone in situations and need to know what is going on, what might happen and I think they need to know also what services. There are out there to help them or to help others and they can then refer others on to other people. What have you done in your school to raise awareness of mental health? So in my school for children's mental health week in 2018 I helped coordinate the activity we did so we managed to do house assemblies where we spoke to all the students in the high school which we got a lot of positive feedback from. Also we did information stand one lunchtime so people could come along and see what we were about and it was mainly come along, have a laugh, see what we were about. And also we did a teacher workshop but in this teacher workshop we were very very surprised to find out that none of the teachers in our school including the support people in what we call the house office at school where students can go for support. None of them had ever had any mental health training which was very very surprising. So we were very pleased to give them their first little taste at it. And from this work I was able to represent all the strong in mind champions in the heritag at the heritag community champion awards. And at these awards the strong in mind champions in the heritag won in the youth cast group. And from this we received some donation to help us carry on with our work. Fantastic, you must have been really proud. Yeah, brilliant. So if other schools were thinking about engaging young people in this sort of project what do you think they could learn from your school? What's gone well in our school is that we've focused the topics head on so we haven't strayed round them, we've gone for it. We decided that when we wanted to do events during this week we decided that we wanted to do them to the best of our abilities and do them well. And we didn't want them to be something that didn't really cover everything. And is there anything that's gone less well that's been challenging? I think there was always a challenge of sitting in an assembly where we have all the people sat in the assemblies. You're always going to have the people that don't let their make faces at you. But then I think once we've done the first two the last ones including the last one went really really well. And we were really happy with how that one went. And I think that once I think it's one then things once you get in and do it it's then a lot easier to maintain doing it. So kind of keep going would be your tip there. Are there any initiatives that you think have been particularly successful? Well the assemblies I think that they've helped lots of certain students and with the assemblies we had the form tutors in there which then gave the form tutors a sort of idea of what is available in school and what is available outside of school so they can then if they're worrying about some sort of form member then they can easily refer them. And what did the assemblies cover and who ran them so it was Strong in Minds your group? Yeah so we did it as Strong in Minds champions and Patricia came along and we focused on what the signs of mental health, what mental health conditions are there, what have we already done, what are we planning to do and how they can get involved if they wish to. Finally is there anything else you'd like to do in your role as a mental health champion in school? As a mental health champion in school I would like to encourage the new generation of champions to come through because in a year time I will be gone and I don't want all the work to just finish when we've gone through. I want there to be the new champions coming through and currently we have got that in place so they are very encouraged to take on the higher roles which I think is really good. So you need to plan for the future in that sort of sustainability and kind of passing the baton on really. Brilliant. Is there anything else you want to say? Ffio Strong in Minds champion.