Rockhurst Leads Local High School Students in Design Thinking Workshop to Address Mental Health Stigma

Last weekend, high school students from across the Kansas City metropolitan area came to the Rockhurst University campus with one goal — to come up with new ways to encourage social inclusion and create a more welcoming environment for their peers with mental health challenges.

It’s a task that might seem daunting — to change the culture for a whole population of young people, even as the conversation about bullying in schools continues to evolve.

But by the end  of the two-day workshop sponsored by Rockhurst University and public policy organization Consensus, the students had new tools at their disposal as they brainstormed — design thinking tools similar to those employed by creative minds at the top companies and organizations throughout the world.

At the Creating Community Solutions Design Thinking Workshop in the St. Ignatius Science Center on the Rockhurst campus, students were introduced to concepts in the realm of design thinking and the foundations of innovation. According to Risa Stein, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Rockhurst University who has helped spearhead the University’s Innovate at the Rock program, the students in the workshop focused on out-of-the-box ways to address and reduce the stigma surrounding teens with mental health challenges.

“They might develop an idea for a mobile app, or for an awareness program their schools can use,” Stein said. “But we think they are going to have a better idea of what solutions will work for their age group and we hope the design thinking workshop will help them discover some creative ways to approach those solutions.”

The workshop is part of an ongoing national conversation about mental illness. In 2013, the White House launched Creating Community Solutions. Project leaders selected Kansas City as one of six lead cities in the national effort. The Kansas City effort is co-sponsored by Mayor Mark Holland and Mayor Sly James, and Consensus, a nonprofit public engagement firm, is project director. Learn more about the initiative at creatingcommunitysolutions.org.

The participants were eased into the concepts on Friday evening, using innovative thinking concepts to create a novel snack food using different criteria, from design to taste to environmental sustainability, as their guide.

Following a Saturday morning address by Kansas City, Kansas, Mayor Mark Holland, students worked on proposals with their peers and innovation-minded mentors from Rockhurst University. Throughout the afternoon, the groups worked on presentations to be delivered later before a panel of distinguished guests.

In addition to part of the ongoing conversation on mental health in Kansas City that began with a community conference in 2013, the weekend was also a continuation of the Innovate at the Rock program, an effort led by Stein and Turner White, MBA, executive assistant professor of management in the Helzberg School of Management, to merge the psychological ideas surrounding creative thinking with the ways that innovation is typically employed in the corporate and nonprofit worlds. More info on Innovate at the Rock can be found at the group’s Facebook page.