Country of Residence
United States
Age
19
Project title
Project:IGYB (I Got Your Back)
Project Summary: Describe your project in one sentence
Project:IGYB trains students to give free, fully anonymous counseling to the classmates who come to them first, so no teenager has to fear becoming a case file in order to get help.
Website URL(s) or social media handles.
https://projectigyb.org/
Project Category
My project is an existing project that I started
Project Stage
Scaling (We’re expanding impact to new locations or in new and innovative ways)
Founding Story: What was the spark that led you to start your project? What was the "Aha!" moment that led you to get started and see the potential for this to succeed?
I was fifteen when I lost my best friend to suicide, and for weeks afterward I went back through our conversations looking for the sentence I missed, which I never found. What I found instead was that several people at my high school had been carrying things they never said out loud, and that a few told me only after the funeral, because the funeral seemed to make it permissible. That was the moment the problem rearranged itself for me: students were already going to each other first, long before the counselor or anyone with a license, which meant a sophomore at a lunch table was doing the hardest listening in the building with no training, no sense of what to do if it turned serious, and nobody to talk to once it was over. The shortage was never of people who cared, but of preparation for the ones students chose. In 2021 I began asking classmates whether they would train for it properly, and six of us worked through Mental Health First Aid after school, learning how to listen without steering and how to recognize when a conversation has gone past what a peer can hold alone. We told students they could talk to us and we would write nothing down, not a name and not a word of it, and sessions were booked within the first week. I had no plan for what any of it would become. What I had was one person I could not help and an uncomfortably clear sense of who would be next.
The Problem: What problem are you helping to solve? Why does it matter to you and your community?
If you ask a teenager why they have not told anyone they are struggling, the answer is almost never that they cannot find the counseling office. It is more often that telling feels like handing over control. A student imagines a call home, a note in a file, a meeting they did not ask for, and whether or not that follows, the anticipation is enough to keep them quiet. School counselors are not the problem here, since they are stretched thin and legally bound in ways students rarely understand, but a teenager who cannot predict what happens after they speak often chooses not to find out. The conversation that eventually happens is then a crisis rather than an ordinary one. The CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Survey found 40 percent of US high school students reporting persistent sadness or hopelessness in 2023. Cost, waitlists, and counselor caseloads explain large parts of the distance between those students and the care they need. What our own surveys keep surfacing is a different obstacle: many students want something smaller and more reversible than an appointment before they are ready to make one. The person most of them talk to first, meanwhile, is sitting beside them in third period with no training, no protocol for a friend who sends something frightening at one in the morning, and no one to process it with. They carry it alone, sometimes for months.
Your Solution: How are you solving this problem? Share your specific solution.
Project:IGYB runs two programs that feed one another, and neither works as well alone. The first is anonymous peer counseling. A student books through our site without a real name, talks one-on-one with a trained counselor, and we keep no record of who they were or what was said. There is no fee and no paperwork. Confidentiality is not unlimited and we say so before a session starts: if a student describes a risk of serious harm, the counselor follows a crisis protocol that surfaces 988 and brings in our on-call contact. Short of that, whether to see a counselor or psychologist stays with the student, and we make a warm handoff if they want one. Counselors earn the role before their first session, completing Mental Health First Aid alongside our training in confidentiality, ethics, and the language to use once a conversation moves past what a peer can hold. Izzi Hardman, our VP and a nursing student at Penn, works with our clinical advisors to keep the training and referral pathways sound. We look after counselors as carefully as students, since sitting with somebody else's pain is heavy, so each has debriefs and supervision and can step out of the rotation as long as they need. The second program is Break the Stigma, which brings assemblies and workshops into partner schools and gives students language for what they feel. It lowers the temperature in a building so students will use the service at all, and it is how roughly seventy percent of our counselors first heard of us. We are piloting a mobile version of this model. A trained language model can sit with a student at three in the morning, when nobody on our team is awake, its job being to stay with them, surface 988 if needed, and connect them to a live counselor when our hours open.
Impact: How has your project created impact / made a difference so far? Or, if at an early stage, what will impact look like?
Since 2021 we have trained more than eighty peer counselors, who have held over six hundred one-on-one sessions with middle and high school students. Because students book anonymously and some come back, that is a count of sessions rather than distinct people, and I would rather say so than imply six hundred separate students. Break the Stigma has reached more than three thousand students across seven counties in Maryland and Virginia, and another five hundred have come through our forums alongside clinicians, educators, and parents. All of it runs on volunteer hours, without a single paid position. There is a limit to what I can honestly claim. Keeping no records means I cannot follow a student from a difficult session in October to a better semester in March, a trade we made on purpose, since anonymity is why students come to us at all. What we know about return visits comes from students mentioning at the start of a session that they have been before, which shows the service is acceptable to them, not that it made them better. The surveys are where we actually learn. More than two hundred and sixty students have responded, and ten student researchers work that data alongside academic advisors at Mount Sinai, Johns Hopkins, Duke, and the University of Toronto. The barrier students name most often is not finding help but not knowing what follows once they ask for it.
Your Innovation: What is different about your project compared to other programs or solutions already out there? How is your project new or innovative?
Trained teen listening lines already exist and some are very good. Teen Line has run for decades with adult clinical supervision, and I do not claim we invented peer support. What is less common is running it outside the school's reporting structure. Most operate through the building, so a student who uses one is visible to the institution in some form. We keep no identifying record, which limits what we can measure and promise, but removes the calculation a student runs about what a conversation might set off. That constraint shapes everything else about how we work. The second difference is who we treat as needing protection. Supervision in peer programs is usually built around quality of care, which matters, but we also schedule debriefs when nothing has gone wrong and let a counselor leave the rotation without justifying it, because a sixteen-year-old absorbing other people's crises will eventually stop absorbing anything. The third is what we are building. Consumer AI companions are generally optimized for engagement, and for a teenager in distress that can cut against them, since a system easier to talk to than a person can make the next human conversation feel less necessary. My research on PsyBot, a psychosis-care language model in development at Mount Sinai, shaped how I think about testing this. One reply can sound compassionate while the pattern built across weeks leaves a young person less willing to reach anyone else, so the question worth measuring is not how long a session runs but whether the student leaves more able to reach a person, and whether the system helps when they try. We are designing ours to be evaluated that way across repeated interactions, and we will publish the evaluations and curriculum so other youth-led groups can use them.
How many people are on your team?
94
Your team: What role(s) do your team members play? How do you share leadership with them?
94 (4 executive team, 80+ active peer counselors, 10 student researchers - including our lead developer)
What’s Next: What are the next steps you plan to take to grow or strengthen your project over the next year? If your project is still in the idea stage, describe the steps you will take over the next three months to launch or begin developing it.
Incorporation comes first because the rest depends on it. Five years of volunteer hours has taken us further than I expected, but partner districts and funders want a legal entity, and nonprofit registration unlocks grants for training materials, translation, and the supervision hours we absorb for free. It also creates a governing board with fiduciary duty, separate from the student executive board that runs things day to day. That funding makes the next two possible. We are adding two counties, prioritizing schools with the worst counselor-to-student ratios, and training the cohort they will need. We are also moving our app out of closed beta toward a supervised release across our seven counties, with the safety evaluations published, not just described. We are also opening the curriculum, preparing our training presentations, ethics materials, and crisis protocols as a free resource, because a student in a district we will never reach should be able to run a version of this without our permission. Internationally, our Haryana pilot expands toward Delhi NCR and Punjab, while Canada stays in planning until we have Ontario clinical advisors and a mapped referral pathway, since a chapter is only as useful as the professionals it can refer to. Both are led by students who live there, and I am presenting at the Science Summit at UNGA alongside partnered organizations.
How do you encourage other people to join your project or learn about the problem you’re working on? If you have a new idea, tell us how you will do this in the future.
Our advocacy campaigns are the front door, and the ask at the end of an assembly is never that students come get counseling. It is closer to this: somebody in this room is already the person their friends go to at midnight, and we will train them properly rather than leave them to improvise. That works because it does not require a teenager to identify as a person with problems in front of their grade, and asks them instead to be useful, which is far easier to volunteer for. More than three thousand students have sat through that pitch, and roughly seventy percent of our counselors came in through it. What happens after they join matters more than how they arrive. Counselors rewrite the training scenarios for the cohort behind them, since the situations they meet are not always the ones we anticipated, and chapter leads decide what their school needs without clearing it with me. Our discussion forums handle the other half, drawing more than five hundred students and community members into conversations about anxiety, social media, and academic pressure. Having parents in the room matters more than people expect, since a student whose mother has heard a psychologist call something common goes home with one fewer obstacle. Volunteers have translated our materials into Spanish, Mandarin, Hindi, Punjabi, and French, which removes one barrier rather than every cultural one.
