By Jennifer Fernandez
In Alamance County, Ivey Broadnax works with young people who may be struggling with mental health issues.
Instead of focusing on mental health symptoms or deficits, Broadnax and other “youth partners,” through Vaya Health, want to build positive childhood experiences for the young people they are helping.
Similar to adult peer support specialists, the youth partners know what they’re talking about. They all have experience themselves, whether it’s having been involved in the judicial system, or having lived in the foster care system, or having struggled with mental health issues.
That shared experience is a fundamental building block for connecting with youth, Broadnax said Jan. 14 at the i2i Center for Integrative Health winter conference during a session on Vaya Health’s Youth and Family Partners program.
“It’s very important, because we’re validating their experiences,” she said. “We’re letting them know that their feelings matter, that we understand where you come from: I’ve been there before. Here’s what worked for me. Let’s work together.
“Through sharing those experiences, you build trust.”
‘We want to do things differently’
Vaya Health is one of four local management entities/managed care organizations, also called LME/MCOs, that manage behavioral health services for low-income residents in North Carolina.
Funding for Vaya Health’s Youth and Family Partners program comes from a four-year grant of about $1 million annually from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and Children’s Mental Health Initiative. It is the second federal grant Vaya Health has won to address mental health by employing youth and family partners. The first grant, from 2020 to 2024, focused on western North Carolina counties.
The youth partners are part of a larger approach to health care called the “system of care,” a “comprehensive network of community-based services and supports” that works to meet the needs of families involved in several child service agencies, from child welfare to juvenile justice to health care, according to the North Carolina Collaborative for Children, Youth and Families.
“We want to do things differently with this grant. We don’t want it to be something that’s kind of a traditional approach, where we just do the same thing that’s already happened before,” Tressy McLean-Hickey, system of care project director for Vaya Health, said at the annual conference in Winston-Salem. “We want it to be something that we can be creative, (that) we can really take youth and family voice(s) and use that to guide the work that we’re doing.”
She explained that Vaya Health’s “Changing Systems Through Youth and Family Leadership” grant has three components: youth partner services, training and evidence-based practices in the community, and community partnerships.
While Vaya Health serves 32 mostly western North Carolina counties, this grant is focused on six of its counties in the Piedmont region: Alamance, Caswell, Chatham, Person, Rockingham and Stokes.
Each county is served by a team made up of a system of care coordinator, a family partner and a youth partner.
Youth partners
Five youth partners were hired for this grant, which runs through 2028. More than 500 people applied for the positions, said Vanessa Vargas, lead family coordinator for Vaya Health.
Along with lived experience, the youth partners also come from various work backgrounds. One has a criminal justice degree, another a bachelor’s degree in science, and another worked in a parks and recreation department.
The youth partners hold one-on-one meetings weekly with people ages 12 to 21 assigned to them.
“We’re nonclinical. I like to remind families of that,” said youth partner Mieesha Smith, who works with young people in Chatham and Caswell counties. “We’re not therapists. We’re not parents. We’re not friends. We’re like cheerleaders to these youth, and I like to be a guide and mentor.”
They’re also “boots on the ground” in communities, said youth partner Hayleigh Marshall. Smith, for example, said she has attended meetings and even a dance recital.
“It’s showing up, being that safe place that they know is going to show up for them, whether it’s a court hearing, guardianship, custody, whatever,” Smith said. “You’re there, and that means a lot to a youth, especially if they don’t have anyone else.”
Youth partner Cheyenne Saunders, who serves Person County, knows how important having support can be. She moved around a lot when she was young because she was in foster care, Saunders said.
“I never was able to build a good connection with any of the adults in my life. So I just didn’t have a supportive person,” she said. “If I can be that supportive person and help guide them, that’s really what got me interested.”
Marshall, who works virtually with participants in Stokes County while she pursues a master’s in social work from UNC Pembroke, said connecting youth with their home communities is important.
“We’re meeting with these stakeholders to understand what services are available in the community and how we can connect our youth to them,” she said. “We’re also trying to see where the gaps are in the community, so we’re trying to fill spaces where needed and see what services we can bring in, or what our youth might be interested in.”
It’s not just about connecting youth to services in their communities. They encourage youth to advocate for themselves.
“It encourages them to use their voice in meetings and just places where they want to be involved,” Broadnax said. “They want to share their passions and their goals for their community.”
“How often have you all heard a teenager say, ‘You don’t understand?’” Broadnax asked the audience.
“I do understand. I’ve been there before,” she continued. “So the purpose of this program is to show them that there are people that stand with you so they don’t feel so alone.”
Focus on the positive
There’s a lot of focus on what’s called positive childhood experiences, which are exactly what they sound like — childhood experiences that have a positive effect. They can also form a counterpoint to adverse childhood experiences, known as ACEs, which include experiences such as physical abuse or neglect or loss of a parent.
For Vaya Health’s youth partners, that means providing young people with leadership opportunities, financial stability and extracurricular activities where they’re around peers.
“And they get to have fun,” Broadnax said. “They get to be a kid.”
They connect youth with training and leadership opportunities, everything from CPR training and driver’s education to workforce training to become a certified nursing assistant or pharmacy technician.
“It could be anything that is working towards this youth being successful, building character — leadership skills, anything that you know is working towards their mental well-being and just being the person that they want to be,” Broadnax said.
McLean-Hickey said the first year of the grant, which was awarded in late 2024, was about building the infrastructure, which included hiring the youth partners, determining what would happen in each county and listening to community members.
The second and third years of the grant will focus on putting everything into action.
The final year will be about sustainability, “to make sure that the good things that we’re bringing in these communities can continue long after our grant ends,” she said.
“We talk a lot about systems change,” McLean-Hickey said. “There are a lot of different ways the systems need to change, but this one, we really want to take that youth and family voice and lived experience and use that to help people be the leaders that … we need in our community.”
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