Active Minds Send Silence Packing is having another fall of “firsts.” We are very excited to be bringing our powerful suicide awareness exhibit to campuses in the South!
The Send Silence Packing truck along with the 1,100 backpacks, thousands of pages of educational material and our traveling road staff will arrive in Washington, DC on Tuesday, October 2, to kick off the Fall 2012 tour at our first display at Howard University!
We recently confirmed professional women’s basketball legend (and Active Minds Spokeswoman), Chamique Holdsclaw, as a guest speaker at Howard’s display where she will be sharing her powerful and moving story of personal struggles and recovery. Chamique does a beautiful job talking about her personal experiences with depression and suicide and we know her words will carry that much more meaning with the 1,100 backpacks stretched out behind her.
We’re also very excited to be welcoming back our seasoned road staffers, Brandon and Nicole, who will be heading out on their fifth and third tours, respectively. These staffers have run multiple displays together and are very excited to be visiting our host locations in the south.
See where else we are going this Fall:
- October 2: Howard University
- October 4: University of Virginia
- October 8: University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
- October 11: University of Georgia Athens
- October 16: Collin College – Central Park campus
- October 18: Collin College – Preston Ridge campus
- October 22: Alvin Community College
- October 25: Lafayette Square in New Orleans, Louisiana
- October 29: University of Alabama Birmingham
- November 1: Emory University
- November 5: Florida A&M University
- November 9: University of Central Florida (conference display)
Suicide claims the lives of more than 1,100 college students each year, and each one of those deaths touches us all. The goal of Send Silence Packing is to raise awareness about the incidence and impact of college student suicide and encourage an open dialogue about mental health. Active Minds hopes that by empowering students and the student voice in mental health awareness, we will see the day when mental health issues are widely discussed, and the number of tragic deaths due to suicide is reduced to 0.
Be sure to keep checking back on the blog to read about our road staffers adventures from the road!
Before you go, here is an interesting “Suicide in America” infographic from the National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare to get you thinking about the incidence and impact of suicide.
