My Health Matters
My Health Matters (MHM) is an annual awareness night hosted by ECHO at UCLA. This program in previous years was named “Mental Health Matters” and was aimed at educating the student body of UCLA about mental health, informing guests about the different resources available to them to enhance their mental well-being, and reducing the stigma associated with mental illness. In the past two years, this event has expanded to create a more holistic health event where we provide free resources and education to the UCLA community on historically stigmatized topics related to ECHO’s four pillars: Mental Health, Food Insecurity, Youth Education, and Houselessness. By encouraging our Bruins to engage in thoughtful conversations about these areas with each other in MHM, they will be more knowledgeable about the well-being of themselves and their peers and be more understanding about the issues that many of our community members face.
What does MHM mean to you?
Mimi Giang and Jessica Zeng were the Co-Outreach Directors of 2019. Here is what they had to say about the night:
“MHM means a lot of things to me! It’s the biggest event our org has ever put together — and it couldn’t have been done with everyone’s help! Ly, our treasurer, sought out all the donations from local businesses to raffle off so we could fundraise money to donate. Cindy served as a liaison between us and our partnering organization, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Lanzel worked hard to coordinate all our volunteers throughout the night, allowing for the logistics of the night to be carried out smoothly. Our interns worked hard to contact student orgs and execute the raffles/auctions. Needless to say, MHM is a collaborative effort. It is the culmination of all our hard work.
MHM serves as our organization’s first great impression on campus. Being a new and relatively unknown organization on campus, I like to think MHM helped spread awareness about ECHO around UCLA and the community. Being the first of many annual awareness night, MHM helps to set a strong foundation that future members can build upon to make upcoming awareness nights bigger and better.
And lastly, MHM is an opportunity for our organization to carry out its goals to the fullest. As our goals are to serve through volunteering, fundraising, and educating, MHM combines all the things we do and allows us to address a community issue that we care about deeply — mental health awareness. With this event, we hope to provide pertinent information to the local community in hopes of opening lines of discussion in order to combat the stigmas surrounding the topic of mental health.” Mimi Giang
“MHM was a great opportunity for UCLA students to get more engaged with the discussion of mental health! Overall, the goal was to provide a space for Bruins to be reminded that they are not alone in our individual journeys toward mental wellness, and I think we did just that.” Jessica Zeng
“How do you think your group activity made an overall impact on the MHM Awareness Night?
“I hoped that it helped to open up discussion, and if someone needs help or needs to talk, maybe it could save their lives or their friend’s life. I think it’s really important to consider all the suicides going on these days and by talking about it, you’re raising more awareness around mental health and preventing things like suicide from happening.
”