The TAY Project Outline

Goals of the project include:

• Help bring youth voice to the Mental Health Services Act (MHSA) planning and implementation process.
• Give special attention to underserved transitional age youth communities in order to increase their meaningful involvement in MHSA planning and implementation process; including but not be limited to ethnic communities, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning youth.
• Outreach to non-represented partners and stakeholders so that all appropriate partners have the opportunity to take part in the changes needed to our current mental health system, including the involvement of primary care and the education system.
• Our mission is to find what is working and what is not working in the mental health system for youth. Furthermore, what can be done better to help youth solve problems and focus on their futures? With the help of providers, consumers and mainly youth, we will help counteract the stigma that is associated with mental health labels or accessing mental health services.
• This project is a statewide effort.

Our goal is to recruit transitional age youth to become youth advocates. Their tasks would include:

• Directly participate in regional and state wide meetings.
• To share personal stories, including their success and failure with the Mental Health system and personal involvement with policy makers.
• Involvement on stakeholder committees.
• Analyze policy, offering feedback, presenting ideas on changes needed for mental health services to become youth-friendly.

The General Goals of those tasks include:

• Develop a youth advocacy network within California.
• Develop information on Prop 63 that is youth-friendly.
• Identify youth organizations to become providers for our project.
• Develop a youth friendly informational internet site.
• To have youth become directly connected at a state level; especially MHSA (Prop 63).

1127 11th St., Suite 925 Sacramento, CA 95814 | Tel: (916) 557-1166 | Fax: (916) 447-2350