A Passion for Mental Health Education
Image Description: Crew4Life members and Live4Life staff at their first in-person get together in Melbourne in 2024. Volunteering through the award-winning Live4Life program, these young leaders are helping to smash the stigma surrounding mental health in their rural communities.
A Passion for Mental Health Education - Crew4Life’s Young Volunteers make a lasting impact on Rural Communities.
Live4Life is a charity that brings together rural and regional communities to improve youth mental health and reduce suicide. We do this by empowering communities to implement Live4Life, the only youth mental health education and suicide prevention model designed specifically for rural and regional communities.
With a suicide rate 40% higher than urban areas and where 63% of young people are unable to access mental health services, rural communities are seeing real, measurable change in mental health outcomes through Live4Life — and young volunteers are at the heart of the program's success.
To celebrate National Volunteer Week, Live4Life would like to highlight a growing number of young people in rural and regional Victoria who are putting their hands up to volunteer as Mental Health Ambassadors for Crew4Life — bringing their Leadership skills and passions to their communities — and helping to smash the stigma surrounding mental health.
What is Crew4Life? Crew4Life is an alumni of Live4Life Crew members — a community of young people passionate about mental health in rural and regional communities.
Crew4Life members use their exceptional advocacy and Leadership skills to drive change — extending their expertise as young Mental Health Ambassadors — supporting community Crew events and activities, and participating in training, storytelling and mentorship programs.
Crew4Life continues the rollout of the Live4Life model — a movement of young people engaged, active and invested in the mental health education and literacy of their peers and the wider community.
In Volunteer Week, we're shining a spotlight on some of our exceptional Crew4Life members! Meet Matilda and Bella and hear about the passion that drives their volunteer work through Crew4Life.
MATILDA comes from the Macedon Ranges and first became involved with the Live4Life Macedon Crew in 2013, more than a decade ago. She volunteered to join Crew4Life to extend her Leadership skills and passion for mental health. “Live4Life is a fantastic organisation that has really good values and a really great community,” she says.
For Matilda, the most rewarding part of being a volunteer is having a network of young people that she gets to spend time with who are passionate and want to make a difference together.
My passion is about youth mental health and creating change from the ground up within a community. I really think it’s important to bring people together to talk about all the different topics and reduce the stigma … spreading awareness and coping mechanisms, self-care tips, because as we know, physical health and mental health are combined.
Matilda believes that volunteering is especially important in rural and regional areas because it gives her an opportunity to be involved in different experiences to what she’s used to.
In regional and rural areas, sometimes there aren’t as many opportunities to break out of your day to day or to meet new people, to get involved with different topics or discussions. It’s a great opportunity to understand some different perspectives.
And Matilda’s tips for young people considering volunteering?
Jump in! You don’t know until you try. You never know who you’re going to meet. Give it a taste and if it’s for you, I’m looking forward to meeting you!
BELLA comes from Live4Life Glenelg Crew and joined Crew4Life because she thinks the stigma around mental health is still really aggressive. “It’s time to put that to rest. Crew4Life is a big part of how we’re going to help,” she says.
For Bella, being part of the Crew at high school encouraged her to continue working with kids with mental health issues and she sees volunteering in rural and regional communities as incredibly important.
We don’t have access to the same mental health advice and info that a lot of city kids do. It’s important to bring that into regional communities and find a place for it and involve everyone, as there’s no way to improve mental health without us fighting the stigma and reassuring people that it’s completely normal and okay to face these things — but you need to face them with other people.
Volunteers like Matilda and Bella work as Mental Health Ambassadors in Crew4Life and their work has a profound impact on the lives of young people in their communities.
What impact is Live4Life having on young people in rural communities?
Over 21,000 young people living in rural and regional communities have received evidence-based mental health education since the program began in 2010.
In 2023, over 6,000 young people received evidence-based mental health education — improving their mental health literacy and ability to offer and seek help, while reducing stigma through the annual program of events and activities.
In 2023, 232 young people joined the Live4Life Crew and were trained and mentored to support their peers as Mental Health Ambassadors. In total, 1,163 young people have joined Live4Life Crew.
The new Crew4Life program now has 34 members from around Victoria who meet at monthly online Kick Back sessions (running since May 2023). Crew4Life had their first in-person get together in April 2024.
Recent awards? Further recognising the hard work and achievements of Crew4Life and Live4Life Crew as young Mental Health Ambassadors, Live4Life has featured prominently in a number of recent awards:
Winner, Suicide Prevention Australia’s LiFE Award for Communites in Action in National Awards and Victorian Awards, 2024.
Finalist, 7News Young Achiever Awards in the Spirit Super Connecting Communities category, 2024.
Finalist, Victorian Community Achievement Awards in the Mental Health and Wellbeing Award category, 2023.
The Live4Life model is expanding in 2024. Live4Life is currently being implemented in 14 communities in Victoria and Tasmania — Ballarat, Bass Coast, Baw Baw, Benalla, Break O’Day, Central Goldfields, Glenelg, Hepburn, Latrobe Valley, Macedon Ranges, Moira, Southern Grampians, South Gippsland and Wellington. With over 20 communities keen to implement Live4Life, we’re scaling in line with funding capacity. We only go where we are invited and use an Expression of Interest process.
Image Description: Crew4Life volunteers Bella and Matilda at the Crew4Life’s first in-person get together in Melbourne in 2024.
Image Description: Alannah Sander, Live4Life’s Youth Engagement worker, with Crew4Life volunteer Bella at the Crew4Life’s first in-person get together in Melbourne in 2024.