Project Less Alone- a mental health awareness project made by Nesbru students
- a mental health awareness project made by Nesbru IB students
Over the past few years, Nesbru VGS has been known to have a variety of projects made by wonderful students. In 2022, a few students from 2IB and 3IB joined together to make a project that would be about mental health and its awareness. The project soon escalated and spread to not just the rest of IB but also to SSP classes and staff. The project was soon called Project Less Alone and had its start in great wonders. For the past few months, the project has gotten more popular and continued to share awareness and good deeds to its cause.
Project Less Alone was originally founded around November 2021 by a couple of 3IB students. Thea Kjær-Klavenes, one of the founders of the project, is the leader of Project Less Alone and works closely with the project deputy Sarah Iman. The main purpose of the project is to raise awareness, to spread important information and a meaningful message about mental health. Mental health is usually something that might not get as much attention or be taken seriously. Furthermore, mental health, or at least talking about it, is faced with scrutiny and stigmatization which vastly limits the discussion of the topic as people are made to feel ashamed of their struggles. These are some things that Project Less Alone is trying to defeat. In a recent talk with the leader, Thea, she mentioned how "During Covid, the rate of people who need professional help for their mental health struggles went up by 50%, and yet psychiatric care facilities are being closed at a pace faster than ever. Still, the topic of mental health is severely stigmatized and overlooked by politicians. We want to make sure that there’s awareness and that people know what help is available to them".
Even though the project started off small with a few members it is having a high growth rate as many students from IB joined in 2022, followed by the normal SSP students. They all are ambitious and want to help spread awareness about mental health in various ways. The members use different ways to promote and share awareness about mental health. The project is divided into committees and groups where they usually have one leader and one specific task to do. Some of these groups are the social media group, the school activities group, and the racism group. Each group does different stuff depending on how they want to share a message, but they all have the same goal which is to spread awareness. These groups have their own schedule on how to finish various things and the students are working quite effectively to get the work done. It all varies from making posters with important messages to posting on Instagram and to having bake sales in the school cafeteria. The purpose of all the different stuff done still lies down at the root, which is obviously to spread mental health awareness around the school and the area since it is important. In many places, mental health is disregarded and considered not important even though many people suffer from mental disorders and problems in their everyday life. Project Less Alone battles this very well and shows an amazing response against the idea of silencing awareness. Despite this project being founded and made by students in Nesbru school, it is growing beautifully and being executed nicely with a good purpose and intent.