Young people are struggling with mental health, and for many, the challenges have worsened over the last decade. About one in three high schoolers report persistent feelings of hopelessness and an alarming number say they’ve had thoughts of suicide.

Blame it on the pandemic, or climate change. Blame it on hyperpartisan politics, or the ubiquity of social media and smartphones. Regardless of the cause, today’s teenagers have made clear, in numerous surveys and anecdotes, that they need support.

But across the country, there are too few mental health specialists to serve the growing number of adolescents who could benefit from their services. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that more than a third of the country lives in an area where there is a shortage of mental health professionals, with at least 6,000 additional practitioners needed.

What we’re really trying to do is to get our youth more people in their corner who understand what they’re experiencing and want to invest in their success.

A cross section of leaders across government, philanthropy and the private sector believe that youth can be the solution to both challenges: They can simultaneously offer help and resources to their fellow Zoomers (as members of Gen Z are often called) while building skills that will draw them into — and will make them successful in — careers in behavioral health.

This fall, at least 500 recent high school and college graduates between the ages of 18 and 24 will make up the inaugural cohort of the Youth Mental Health Corps, a national initiative led by AmeriCorps, America Forward, Pinterest and the Schultz Family Foundation.

To start, it will launch in four states: Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and Texas. A year later, in fall 2025, seven more states are expected to join the program: California, Iowa, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Utah and Virginia.

“It is really an innovative effort to try to address both parts of this crisis, by enabling initially hundreds and then thousands of young people to serve … in communities,” says Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a managing director at the Schultz Family Foundation.

Members of the Youth Mental Health Corps will serve for at least one year, with placements in middle and high schools as well as community-based organizations and health clinics. The program, which supports members in enrolling in or continuing college courses to work toward earning a degree, offers members career guidance on selecting a credential pathway to pursue and preparation and training for their placement.

Because members are just starting out in behavioral health, they will not be working as therapists or counselors, Chandrasekaran notes. Instead, they’ll primarily serve as “navigators,” helping connect peers and near-peers to services that already exist in their communities that they may not know about or know how to access.

“Folks often don’t know where to start,” explains AJ Pearlman, director of Public Health AmeriCorps. “That navigation and resource support is incredibly helpful, being in school or at a community clinic, meeting people where they are.”

Last year, AmeriCorps invested upward of $260 million in programming to support mental health nationwide, a spokesperson shared. In recent years, AmeriCorps applicants have increasingly shown interest in the mental health and behavioral health fields, at the same time that demand for mental health services has risen. The Youth Mental Health Corps is launching in response to those twin trends.

As a current AmeriCorps member serving with Colorado Youth for a Change, an organization that will become part of the Youth Mental Health Corps this fall, Nelly Grosso, 24, is getting a preview of what this work will look like. She connects high school students to mental health resources, food banks, pro bono immigration lawyers and public assistance programs such as SNAP and Medicaid.

Grosso, who identifies as a “first-generation American student,” says she primarily works with students who, like her, are the first in their family to navigate the American education system. Grosso has found that many students face language, income and resource barriers that are making it difficult for them to show up to school and engage in class. Those barriers are also taking a toll on students’ mental health. She introduces different coping mechanisms and calming strategies to students who are experiencing anxiety, depression, stress and anger, she says, but most of all, she’s trying to help remove the obstacles causing those feelings in the first place.

“It’s really hard to ask for help … because you don’t [always] know what you need,” she says. “It’s easy to feel isolated and alone.”

Grosso has created packets for her students that direct them to a host of free resources available to them. “I’m planting little seeds in everybody’s brain,” she says, so that when they are struggling, they’ll remember there’s a whole list of people and organizations that can help them.

Although Youth Mental Health Corps members will be acting more as liaisons to behavioral health services than delivering those supports themselves, their exposure to such services — and the people who provide them — is intended to help members learn about the field and further incentivize them to launch careers in it, Pearlman adds.

During their service year, they’ll receive a living stipend and an education award, along with training and credentials that will get them started on the path toward behavioral health.

“It will give them a leg up, a head start, in their journey to hopefully become a trained mental health professional,” Chandrasekaran says of the experience.

Nobody understands teenagers more than somebody who has recently been through high school.

Both Pearlman and Chandrasekaran refer to the youth mental health challenges today as a “national crisis,” echoing a sentiment that the U.S. Surgeon General has made clear in recent years.

They believe other young adults, of the same generation as the teens and tweens whose mental health is imperiled, are well positioned to help.

Corps members will know firsthand what it’s like to navigate high school in the era of social media, for example. They’ll know what it’s like to experience regular lockdown drills throughout the school year and to feel that the future of the planet rests on their shoulders.

“What we’re really trying to do is to get our youth more people in their corner who understand what they’re experiencing and want to invest in their success,” Pearlman says.

Grosso has found that to be true of her experience in AmeriCorps.

“Nobody understands teenagers more than somebody who has recently been through high school,” she says, noting that she uses TikTok and Instagram to relate to the students she works with at a public high school in the Denver metro area. “That’s a huge privilege that comes with being my age.”

But it goes deeper than that for Grosso. Raised by her monolingual Spanish-speaking grandparents, she felt that she was left to navigate the U.S. education system on her own. Surrounded by peers who spoke of things like SATs, PSATs and FAFSA forms, she felt lost.

She says that’s why this work resonates so much with her.

“My students are going through the same, or very similar, things that I did in high school,” Grosso explains. “I’m able to be the person to my students that I didn't have, which is really healing.”

With interest in the teaching profession waning and enrollment in teacher preparation programs reaching historic lows, all eyes are on the next crop of students — tomorrow’s prospective educators — to make up the deficit.

Today’s high school and college students are part of Generation Z, a group of people who range in age from 12 to 28, and have characteristics, attitudes and aspirations that distinguish them from prior generations.

In partnership with researchers at Vanderbilt University, the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB), a nonprofit that works to improve public education across 16 states in the Southeast, has been examining the next generation’s interest in the teaching profession and has published their findings in a report released in April.

Using extensive student survey data from ACT, a nonprofit assessment organization, along with state-level educator data and interviews with Gen Z teacher candidates and newly hired teachers, the researchers gained insight into Gen Z’s perceptions and motivations around teaching and identified opportunities to attract more of them into the field.

Though the study concentrates on two “data-rich” states, Kentucky and Tennessee, researchers say their findings are consistent with what one might expect to see nationally.

“A lot of trends in Kentucky and Tennessee mirror the trends in the South and across the nation,” says Megan Boren, project manager at SREB and a co-author of the report — with the caveat that teacher shortages are generally more severe in the South than in other parts of the U.S.

Gen Z is more college-going and tech-savvy than its predecessors. It is more racially and ethnically diverse. And according to a literature review conducted by the researchers, Americans who are part of Gen Z say they want jobs that provide financial security and ongoing support, along with flexibility, autonomy, collaboration and a sense of purpose.

Some of those characteristics are consistent with careers in education. Teaching, many would argue, is one of the most meaningful jobs available. It is not, however, known for its flexibility or pay.

As a result, members of Gen Z are less interested in becoming teachers than earlier generations. Enrollment in preparation programs began to dip around 2010, but it hit new lows once the first members of Gen Z (colloquially referred to as Zoomers) entered higher education in 2014, researchers found.

The decline has become worse in the decade since, says Thomas Smith, professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt and an author of the report.

Drawing on ACT data from the eight Southern states that require or pay for high schoolers to take the test, Smith and his colleagues found that, between 2013 and 2022, interest steadily dwindled. Because it was already minimal to begin with, the researchers say, this is a worrying trend.

“In our country, the best avenue that students have to excel, to achieve and to be part of this workforce is through education,” says Stephen Pruitt, president of SREB. “So if we don’t have the people who are able to teach our students, it’s going to be a severe cap on what people are able to do.”

There are ways to turn that trend around, Boren and Smith believe.

In the study, they found that participation in introductory high school teaching courses in Kentucky and Tennessee was increasing. It’s possible, they say, that the emergence of those classes has prevented even steeper declines among those entering the field, and that cultivating an early interest in education is key to building a strong pipeline. (It’s also possible, Smith adds, that such courses are popular because they are seen as “easier.”)

Data from the annual Tennessee Educator Survey found that more than half of early-career teachers entered college “already sure or pretty sure” that they wanted to go into education.

“That leads us to keep thinking about what can be done early on to get people hooked on teaching as a profession,” says Smith.

Gen Z is looking for flexibility. Teaching has not traditionally been a flexible job.

Boren agrees that early exposure could be a critical route for getting more people into educator preparation programs and, ultimately, classrooms.

“Teaching is less attractive than maybe it once was,” she acknowledges. “Parents are not encouraging their children to go into teaching. Sometimes teachers aren’t encouraging students to go into teaching. If we were able to turn that narrative around and introduce the wonderfulness of teaching to students early on, give them a taste of it — perhaps that can be one of the many ways we can get more folks into the classroom.”

Still, that tactic doesn’t solve the many downsides to teaching that Gen Z sees: rigid scheduling, isolation in classrooms, low compensation, lack of autonomy, and a lack of respect, appreciation and professionalization from the public.

“Gen Z is looking for flexibility,” Smith says. “Teaching has not traditionally been a flexible job.”

It’s a difficult reality, especially when many other jobs have only become more flexible since the pandemic; hybrid and remote working arrangements have stuck around in other sectors.

It’s not just about remote work, though, Boren says. “The way things have always been done is not attractive to Gen Z.” They want work-life balance. They want to incorporate “innovative technology use,” she says.

Boren says there are “hundreds” of examples of schools creatively building flexibility into the workday and work week for teachers.

One strategy is hiring additional support staff, allowing teachers to have guaranteed planning time or freeing them up to walk down the hall and observe a colleague teach a lesson. That lends itself to both flexibility and support, she notes. Boren shared about a district that opens one hour late on Wednesdays so staff can run errands or otherwise get that time back for themselves. She also mentioned a school in Oklahoma that worked with the community to set a schedule that allows teachers to have every Friday off work in April and May, when the weather is nice and morale may be slipping toward the end of the school year.

“A little bit of give and take is really what folks are asking for,” she says.

Those examples, so far, are sparing. Pruitt, the SREB president and a former teacher, concedes that in most places, trying to make any changes to the structure of the school day or week is going to be met with resistance.

“We’re in the same model we’ve been using since the 1800s,” he says, underscoring the challenge.

Members of Gen Z also want to be a part of work that is collaborative, which exists in pockets of the profession but is “not a strong tradition in teaching,” Smith says. “There’s much more of a tradition of being on your own in your class with your door closed.”

The relationship with students — along with the impact on young people and, by extension, society — is attractive to members of Gen Z, Boren and Smith say. It also aligns with what EdSurge has found in interviews with early-career teachers and teacher candidates who are part of Gen Z.

Yet a sense of purpose alone clearly isn’t sufficient to compel enough young people into the field.

Some members of Gen Z may have seen firsthand, as students, that their teachers were not given the support, tools or appreciation they needed to be successful, Smith notes. Others may have internalized negative narratives and perceptions of teaching that others share.

“Those messages are being picked up by lots of folks, and certainly Gen Z included,” says Smith. “It’s not doing us any favors to get more teachers.”