Whitney M. Young Job Corps is about to make history.

The center has an on-campus group affiliated with the National Alliance on Mental Illness – one unlike anything seen at Job Corps before.

Amy Worthington (LCSW), Whitney’s mental health consultant, said that the conversation had come up at the national level about partnering with NAMI – and Whitney was one of the first centers to take initiative.

“Our center in particular seemed to be very determined that we wanted to make this happen as soon as possible,” Worthington said.

That determination led Whitney to discussions with the state and local chapters. Whitney became a stigma-free workplace with the organization. But that grew into something more.

Mental health clubs were already part of the conversation for on-campus needs – especially after two years of COVID-19 exacerbated existing mental health problems – and partnering with NAMI was a natural next step.

And as part of that, Whitney’s students will be in the driver’s seat for group leadership.

According to Nancy Brooks, executive director of NAMI Louisville, the first steps involved educating students on best practices. “After we do that, we’re going to slowly allow them to use their creative energies to become the leaders of the group, and then we slowly pull away…six months or a year from now, the group will be student-led entirely.”

The first meeting on making this a reality has already happened – and students are already making plans and throwing their names into the hat for leadership positions.

And with 25 percent of the population dealing with some sort of identified mental health conditions, there’s never been a better time.

“We deal with that a lot here,” Worthington said. “We want to be adequately prepared to empower our students to utilize their voices to take care of themselves in holistic ways and to be great advocates.”

To that end, NAMI prefers to empower friends and family as well as those who experience mental illness themselves to lead.

“Group leaders have to be qualified as a peer of the group that they’re going to lead. So they either have to be an individual who has their own mental health journey, or a family member of that individual,” Brooks said.

And for Worthington, Whitney couldn’t be a better place to raise that kind of culture.

“We are at the Whitney M. Young Job Corps,” Worthington said. “There is a legacy of advocacy, there is a legacy of overcoming barriers and empowering our youth to use their voices…This is just a natural progression of that.”