NYCHA Staten Island Residents Trained on Community Wellness
What is wellness and what does community wellness look like? These are questions that participants in the Staten Island Wellness Fellows program answered – and also asked of their fellow Staten Island residents, to come up with the activities residents want to take care of their mental health and wellbeing as well as to share wellness resources across their communities.
The Staten Island Wellness Fellows program was funded by the Mayor’s Office of Equity and managed by the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. It is aligned with the City’s Care, Community, Action Mental Health Plan and part of nationwide work to address rising rates of youth suicide. Fellows learned about suicide prevention and various wellness practices, surveyed and engaged their fellow residents to determine their mental health priorities, and worked to identify mental health supports in the community.
Thirty residents were recruited to become fellows in March 2023. The intergenerational group – ages 17 to 87 – live at Todt Hill, Mariners Harbor, Stapleton, West Brighton, and South Beach Houses.
The program, which concluded on June 30, was overseen by Dr. Paul Archibald, an assistant professor in the Department of Social Work at CUNY’s College of Staten Island who grew up at Mariners Harbor. Dr. Archibald said that one of the fellows’ first activities was to learn the history of their developments.
“If we’re talking about wellness, we need to understand some of the historical perspectives of the areas they’re in,” Dr. Archibald said. “It was fun for the residents to learn things they didn’t know about their homes. You could see this new, developed love for where they live. We then began identifying things they wanted to incorporate for wellness activities, because they wanted to go beyond talk therapy. One interesting thing was the ask to incorporate hair wellness. With how important hair is in our culture, I didn’t know how many people in the community were silently dealing with hair loss and how it affects their mental health.”
Fellows received trainings on mental health, hair wellness, pain management, opioid overdose prevention, suicide prevention, health and juicing, how to engage mental health professionals, online application development, and how to engage and survey residents. They also called mental health practitioners on Staten Island to find out the services they offered, if they had practitioners of color, and if they were accepting new clients, so that they could provide information about these resources to residents.
“The big culmination is that they’ve been surveying NYCHA residents and other Staten Islanders to develop a Yelp-like app that will identify places of belonging on the Island,” Dr. Archibald said. “Stores and other types of businesses where people felt like they belonged.”
Fellows also hosted wellness carnivals, which brought together various practitioners at the developments so that residents could be introduced to beneficial activities like aromatherapy, drumming, and yoga.
South Beach Houses Resident Association President Rashida Reid said she applied to become a Staten Island Wellness Fellow because, “I love being able to help my community – so having something more I could get involved in, learn from, and be compensated for was great.”
“When I originally thought of wellness, I only thought of things to help you mentally,” Ms. Reid said. “I didn’t think about yoga, drumming, or art therapy. We had a wellness event at Stapleton and had all of those activities at the event, plus good healthy food. We also had activities for the entire family – which is important to NYCHA residents. There was also another event that addressed a tragedy that came out of South Beach. What I learned is that people need to be heard. We need to listen to people and what they’re going through. I also think about the growth that fellows went through. We are out in our communities now possibly being change agents.”
She is looking forward to taking what she’s learned through the program and implementing activities that serve the health and wellness of her neighbors.
Dr. Archibald said that is precisely the benefit of training residents who are involved in their communities: “Everything we did with the fellows individually, we had the goal for them to take it out into the development. They were being trained as the first responders for their developments.”
“NYCHA celebrates this community-led initiative to identify and test local solutions to community mental health challenges,” said Andrea Mata, NYCHA’s Director of Resident Health Initiatives. “The Staten Island Fellows project helped develop local expertise in mental health and wellbeing and offers a strong model for leaders working across communities to unlock resources.”
To learn more about community mental health across NYC, visit Home – Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health (cityofnewyork.us) or Mental Health and Substance Use – NYC Health. To connect with the fellows team, or share a question or idea on how to build community mental health, email health.initiatives@nycha.nyc.gov or call 212-306-8282. 306-8282.
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