An award-winning initiative at the Oak Park Public Library continues its work promoting mental health resources and tools for teens in the community.
Ashley Knapp, an assistant professor and researcher at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, has partnered with the library since 2019 to explore ways to improve access to mental health resources for teenagers in Oak Park.
Knapp, who has a doctorate in experimental psychology, said public libraries are an ideal place for this kind of program.
“I found it’s a really big safe space for teens, especially teens with minoritized identities like BIPOC teens or sexual and gender minority teens,” Knapp said. “It’s a really beautiful safe space that they go to, and they just feel validated. They feel a sense of belonging and camaraderie with other teens.”
The program is now in the final year of a five-year seed grant from the Alliance for Research in Chicagoland Communities, a program of the Center for Community Health at Northwestern University.
After years of research and community engagement, the team is currently developing and testing resources they created.
“Right now, we’re in the developmental stage for creating the app for kids, for teens, and they can have access to that through Oak Park Public Library,” Simmons said.
Simmons said funding to sustain this initiative will continue from a combination of library resources and Northwestern’s Feinberg Institute as they go forward with these resources. He said that the team hopes to have a digital mental health resource available for teens through the library’s website by December 2025.
Partnering with Oak Park Public Library’s Middle and High School Services staff and Robert Simmons, director of Social Services and Public Safety, Knapp has worked alongside a team to develop technology-based mental health resources for teens with access to the library.
Creating advisory groups of individuals in the community, the team was able to assess and understand the specific mental health concerns of teenagers in Oak Park. Both adult and teen advisory boards were formed to see how mental health issues present themselves in teens and what resources from the library might aid the community, assessing what is needed and what currently stands in the way.
“The teen advisory board was comprised of predominantly teens from Oak Park, but also Oak Park teens that use Oak Park Public Library,” Simmons said. “From the Austin area, from Western Cook County. We got a wide swath of teens that use the library, in general, to give us feedback and to help us with the design strategy and things of that nature.”
Using formal library programs, teen-led town halls, assessment interviews, and informal conversations, the team has been able to work closely with the community to develop tools that best serve the area.
“The main message, I think, that I got was they just don’t feel like their current mental health experiences are in the current teen narratives of mental health and we just have to do better,” Knapp said. “So, that’s what we’ve been doing. Co-creating and co-adapting with teens to create digital mental health resources.”
The team’s initiative won the 2023 ARCC Community-Academic Research Partnership Award last September for their work. The ARCC established the Community-Academic Research Award in 2012 to recognize collaborations for strong research principles and collaboration promoting health and equity in Chicagoland.
“I think that recognition really highlighted the importance of the partnership,” Simmons said of the award. “But also the need for more digital resources for marginalized teens in our country, really. Not just Oak Park.”