A good friend of mine works with an organization called “Active Minds” and they have submitted an entry to the Pepsi Refresh Project to get funding for their work in bringing awareness of mental health issues and suicide to local college campuses. Please take a minute to click on this link and vote for them: http://www.refresheverything.com/sendsilencepacking

Overview:

Active Minds’ Send Silence Packing is a traveling display of 1,100 donated backpacks representing the 1,100 college student lives lost to suicide each year. This interactive event ends the silence around student suicide by bringing attention to the 1 in 10 students who contemplate suicide. We foster a dialogue about the 1,100 who commit suicide and ways to get that number to 0. The display manages to put a human face on the numbers of this tragedy. We have the capacity to continue this dialogue on campuses through our chapters long after the display is broken down, but we need your help to build it up. Active Minds can pair the display with speakers on the subject and the resources to start or maintain a chapter of Active Minds on a campus that hosts the display to ensure that the dialogue is not dropped and instead is continued at that school for years to come.