Starting in early 2018, I volunteered with a grassroots suicide prevention organization called the Suicide Prevention Coalition of Iowa County, created and run by a woman who had lost her brother to suicide. She was collecting resources to share and running awareness campaigns because there was nothing else. She knew first hand how suicide can devastate an entire community. I learned a lot from her on how to organize communities around an issue that touches all of our lives – starting with writing letters to the editor to the local paper, helping set up awareness events, distributing resources and hanging up flyers, talking to people who worked directly with vulnerable populations, and getting to know many folks who had lost someone to suicide. Every person I met reaffirmed my commitment to stay alive.

Through my volunteer efforts, I met the program director of the Southwestern Wisconsin Behavioral Health Partnership, a program run by Southwestern Wisconsin Community Action Program (SWCAP), a community development organization located in Dodgeville. She subsequently hired me as her project assistant in the beginning of 2019. I helped with developing and implementing a lot of our programming.

• SWBHP was founded on the principles of Asset-Based Community Development, a school of thought that focuses on utilizing existing assets to improve communities. I created asset maps for each of the five counties we operated in and helped transform them into an online resource database called the Southwestern WI Network of Care (pictured above).
• In a huge geographical region with limited resources, this online database was designed to help people know what resources existed in their immediate area and how to use them most efficiently. I wrote “Things to Consider when Looking for a Therapist” to help people access limited services with greater efficiency.
• I designed social media campaigns for May (Mental Health Month) and September (Suicide Prevention Month), harnessing my lived experience to connect people to the work that we were doing in the community.
• I created the website for our organization (swbhp.org) to tell our story and share the progress of our programs.
• I worked on media campaigns like the “Break Your Stress Cycle” campaign, which worked to normalize conversations around stress and anxiety during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and help people incorporate coping mechanisms into their daily lives.
• I researched and designed Mental Health Resource guides for each county, and created a suicide prevention one-pager handout/flyer

By 2023, my time with the grant funded project had wrapped up and in 2024 I began volunteering with NAMI Dane County as a speaker on the lived experience panel for their Crisis Intervention Trainings for local law enforcement. I became trained as a peer support group facilitator that same year, and have been facilitating their Adult Mental Health Peer Support Groups (both in-person and virtual) every Monday for nearly two years now.

In spring of 2026, I began a pilot program with NAMI called “Support Kitchen” which combines a peer support group with a cooking class. My full time job is working as a sous chef, and as I continue to gain more experience in the culinary field, I learn more about myself and my own mental health journey. Cooking saved my life, and many cooking techniques that I have learned have also taught me coping skills and valuable lessons while living with depression. Support Kitchen is my first attempt at sharing those skills with folks both in their own kitchens and on their own journeys.