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Youth mental health systems are struggling, even as more young people turn to digital tools for support. Headstream meets this moment by bringing entrepreneurs and youth together to co-create technology grounded in lived experience. Through the Accelerator, Residency, and Youth Co-Creator Club, founders refine and scale products while young people shape the tools designed for them. The result is stronger, more relevant mental health technology and a growing ecosystem built to better support youth well-being.

Schools are at the frontlines of student mental health and well-being, but rising needs and limited resources make support challenging. The K-12 Mental Health Tech Navigator, created by Headstream with The Jed Foundation and Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute, helps districts identify and fund digital tools that supplement care when counselors and staff are stretched thin. Learn how the updated Navigator offers interactive guidance, expanded resources, and actionable pathways to ensure every student has access to the support they deserve.

As the youth mental health crisis accelerates innovation across digital health, AI, and neuroscience, one critical voice is too often left out: young people themselves. This article explores why co-creating with youth, not just designing for them, is essential for building tools that are truly effective, ethical, and engaging. From app design to therapeutic delivery, youth co-creation is transforming mental health innovation from the inside out.

The Residency Program was created to scale groundbreaking innovations in adolescent mental well-being across health and education systems. Meet the seven members and their companies, and learn how they are driving impact to enhance youth mental health, with a focus on marginalized communities including Latinos, LGBTQIA+, and BIPOC youth.

Headstream, an initiative under SecondMuse aimed at enhancing the mental well-being of adolescents in marginalized communities, has unveiled its 2024 Headstream Accelerator. Supported by Pivotal Ventures, founded by Melinda Gates, this four-month program began in April and hosts 15 start-ups, empowering their CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs to collaboratively develop digital health solutions with youth involvement and explore alternative funding avenues. Each participant receives a $30,000 stipend, gains access to curated online and offline events, and taps into Headstream's extensive community of over 500 potential investors and customers. The Accelerator's mission is to spearhead a digital transformation that expands access and resources while championing equity-driven digital health and educational technology (edtech) products geared towards supporting the mental well-being of today's youth in the US. By fostering inclusivity, the program offers a platform for innovators from diverse backgrounds to collectively scale these inclusive technologies. The 14 start-ups selected for this cohort are committed to dismantling the unjust systems affecting BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and multi-hyphenate individuals by developing affordable and accessible mental well-being solutions.

Headstream, an innovation program by SecondMuse that works to improve the mental well-being of adolescents within systematically excluded communities, today announced the members of its 2024 Youth Co-Creator Club, a five-month virtual program from March 25 to July 23 to position BIPOC, Latinos, and LGBTQIA+ youth as co-creators of digital products. The new cohort will consist of 23 members between the ages of 13 and 20 from across the U.S.

Ziarekenya Smith, the Founder of Inpathy, and Kathryn Young, the COO at Inpathy, are reimagining social media by introducing real human elements that bring people together emotionally to recreate the human experience. Inpathy’s goal is to show people it’s okay to be human and have a healthy relationship with all emotions online and offline.

As a young person looking for your next opportunity, it is easy to get lost in the countless number of apps, platforms, and google searching. The process can be overwhelming and time-consuming. You may end up signing up for more services that lead to nowhere. Finding your next opportunity should not feel this daunting- it should be easy and fun!

Dreami is a platform that connects mentees to the mentors they need in their career, based on their professional goals and values. Especially now more than ever, meeting the right mentor to guide your career takes luck, patience, and a lot of LinkedIn messages and coffee chats. Most of the time, it feels like you are left on your own to navigate your career. Dreami is on a mission to break those barriers and provide everyone with the right resources they need to take their career to the level they dream of. Dreami lives and breathes by our belief that together, we are limitless.

When the Surgeon General released its 2021 advisory on the youth mental health crisis, I was relieved that authorities were finally putting words to what I saw everywhere. As a middle and high school teacher working with youth across the U.S. and throughout the world, I am painfully aware of the ways in which adolescents—especially those who identify as girls — experience disproportionately high rates of anxiety, depression, eating disorders and feelings of isolation. Internal research from Instagram shows that contemporary social media platforms contribute to this mental health crisis by hijacking young women’s attention at a critical time of development, and algorithmically feeding content which can amplify insecurities related to body image and appearance. This Teenage Life (TTL) does the opposite. We help adolescents—especially girls and LGBTQIA+ youth—feel authentically connected and represented through dialogue, community, storytelling, and media production.

At Peer Health Exchange’s Youth Innovation Lab, our work is rooted in helping youth navigate today’s harsh world while recognizing that they’re not alone. Our vision is that all young people get the support they need, wherever and whenever they need it, and whoever they are. Part of the challenge that comes with designing for a large population is prioritizing their identities—like race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation—at the forefront, proudly. You can’t design a truly safe space that is safe to just one community– like female-identifying, Black or queer. It needs to be something for whomever comes searching, especially if an individual identifies across various communities.

Our little place in the world, Earth, has changed in many ways over the time we have been able to record. The ground we walk on has changed shape, and the flora and fauna around us have morphed over time on our hands. The weather fluctuates and so does the life of your average human; all of this is expected and we understand it, even if we don’t like it. But one thing has become a part of our daily life that moves at a pace most can’t keep up with, barely starting to understand its current state before it changes again.

03/21/2004 Was the day that this convoluted, shy, outrageous, intelligent strategist, technology lover yet perfectly imperfect being was born. I was born in the city of Belo Horizonte which translates to Pretty Horizon in English, in the state of Minas Gerais (Brazil) on the very first day of spring. I was privileged enough to have a semi-normal childhood and be born into a high middle-class family function. However, I faced lots of difficulties in my relationship with my parents that not only impacted me as a person but still have an impact on my relationship with them to this very day.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there have been record-high rates of adolescent sadness, and there has been an increase in struggles with anxiety, stress, depression, loneliness, and suicide among young people. The rates are significantly higher for Black and Brown youth who have intersectional identities. The use of technology offers a chance to improve access to mental health care services, connect and socialize, and develop skills and learn. Technology has the potential to make it possible for a greater number of young people to receive the assistance they require.

According to the CDC’s recent Youth Risk Behavior Survey, nearly three in five teenage girls felt persistent sadness in 2021, double the rate of boys. One in three girls seriously considered attempting suicide. This same report also showed high levels of violence, depression, and suicidal thoughts among lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth. The rate at which the teen mental well-being crisis continues to grow is alarming, but we should not be suprised that the communities our society marginalizes are most impacted. 

As the number of teenagers struggling with mental health issues continues to climb, the need for innovative solutions to address this crisis has never been more urgent, with rising levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide rates among this age group. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, one in six youth between the ages of 6 and 17 live with a mental health condition, and as a result, there is a growing need for mental health services that cater to our young people and create an opportunity for mental health startups to address this crisis.

Loneliness, anxiety, and digital wellness are modern-day challenges that can take a toll on the mental health of young people. According to the World Health Organization, 50% of mental health problems begin before the age of 14, and if left untreated, these challenges can lead to serious consequences such as academic failure, substance abuse, and even suicide. Mental health is also closely linked to physical health, with mental health issues increasing the risk of physical health problems such as heart disease and diabetes.

Headstream’s mission to create a positive and inclusive youth digital wellness ecosystem starts with access. This is why we recently launched Headstream Learning Lab (HLL) – a community-building and social-learning platform with open and unlimited access to practices, tools, and resources that support youth innovations in digital health, ed-tech, and social tech sectors. Our first two courses, Youth Co-Creation and Impact Measurement and Management, are tailored for any entrepreneur, innovator, or organization focused on youth digital wellness.

The most pivotal innovations have the power to transform our cultural identity, creating rifts in the status quo that most of us did not even know we wanted, or in some cases, needed. While these innovations may seem to appear out of thin air, they are often rooted in the personal journeys of the innovators who carry with them a deep vision for positive change. In 2022, the Headstream Accelerator continued our mission to bring culturally disruptive digital technologies to life that prioritize the mental wellness of youth people, particularly girls, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ teens. At no point was our community louder than during the Headstream Innovation Festival.

After two years of working with young people across the United States, one fact has become painstakingly clear: young people have incredible ideas to build a beautiful internet. Today’s youth are constantly ideating innovative solutions, and yet, are deprived of the fundamental resources to nurture those ideas into fruition. The drive from young people to truly be the creators behind the next wave of social technologies is what ignited Headstream to launch the Youth 2 Innovator (Y2I) Incubator Program. The Y2I Incubator is a 3-month virtual program for young people ages 13-21 across the United States to create their own innovation that uplifts well-being on digital spaces for young people.

When you imagine the word “entrepreneur” what type of individual do you envision in your mind? Oxford Dictionary defines an entrepreneur as, “a person who sets up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit.” That definition is pretty vague and could apply to just about anyone. In the past two decades, the celebration of entrepreneurs as productive, if not crucial, members of the economy has created new ways for individuals to rely on themselves to improve their own circumstances and their communities. Perceptions about the risk surrounding entrepreneurship have also changed. Over these same two decades, the definition has morphed and stereotyped so that it only seems to apply to a select few. Due to the media, entertainment, and pop culture, there is a false narrative that the definition only applies to young, white, men. This narrow and exclusive framing has direct implications of how we envision entrepreneurs in the 21st century, especially on the next generation who don’t fit those metrics.

In order to build economies that are inclusive and just for communities of LGBTQIA+, Black, Indigenous, and Latino youth, we have to research in a way that is accessible, representative, and just. Headstream has been redefining how we conduct research at our parent company SecondMuse, and our initiative, Digital Delta, is breaking new ground. Digital Delta uses the wisdom of the crowd to guide our understanding of digital youth well-being. By crowdsourcing our insights from hundreds of perspectives, with an emphasis on the voices of young people, we have democratized our research. Currently, 36% of Digital Delta’s insights have been sourced from young people.

Every opportunity that involves a youth serving as an advisor has the potential for mentorship. As a part of the Youth 2 Innovator Program (Y2I) Advisory Board, our cohort of teens were paired with an innovator to not only advise their innovation but to be mentored by them. The beauty of our advisory program is how a teenager anywhere in the US can gain a mentor and influence the design process of an innovation that deeply cares for the well-being of youth through digital spaces. As Headstream prepares to roll out our second iteration of the Y2I Advisory Board program, Youth Advisors Madison Ramos and Rachel Patterson shared their experiences advising Headstream Innovation, Novelly. Their experiences working with Novelly show the myriad of ways mentorship can be manifested and the profound impact it has on the well-being of youth.

In a first of its kind program, Headstream worked with entrepreneurs to reimagine social technology that supports and enhances youth wellbeing. Over a six-month period, the Headstream Accelerator helped 15 innovators scale their innovations to shape the technologies young people depend on as they grow up With a focus on digital solutions for young people in the social tech, ed-tech, and digital health sectors, these 15 entrepreneurs worked diligently to integrate youth voice, specifically LGBTQIA teens, BIPOC teens, teen girls, and those within those intersections, into their innovations.

It has been almost two months since the tragic murder of George Floyd, and unlike any other movement in history, we now have a powerful tool that makes this moment unique: social technology. Racist dogmas and policies are being confronted every second on social media. Social tech has enabled the amplification, connection, and organization of a new generation of young leaders to shape society’s views. As this generation continues to shape our views at Headstream, we had to ask the crucial question -- What is our role in building an anti-racist world?

At Headstream, we know the power and aptitude of digital technology. We also know that we need to empower the current generation of young people to help build and maintain positive inclusive digital spaces. That’s why we were determined to embrace the virtual possibilities of connecting with our Social Tech Science Fair.

More than ever, we as a community need to be supporting today’s youth as they navigate these unprecedented times. Headstream is dedicated to improving the digital well-being of today’s teens, which is why we’re proud to announce the expansion of our program to include a new Incubator and a second Accelerator. Our goal is to create a digital world focused on promoting positivity for teens and we’re excited to highlight the innovators playing such a huge role with this mission.

As each of one of us adapts to unforeseen circumstances and an unpredictable future, now more than ever we need to listen, learn, and support solutions that meet the needs of individuals where they are. At Headstream, we are working on a number of different initiatives to support communities impacted by Covid-19. Before we look forward, we reflect on the design principle that will continue to guide our work, and led us to a group of 15 Headstream Innovators working to create inclusive, supportive and enriching digital places for young people.

The process of understanding complicated, interconnected social challenges can be messy at first. When we embarked on the journey to understand teen wellbeing in today’s hyperconnected world, we knew we had to start by connecting many disparate pieces into a whole. This meant we had to geek out a bit and lean on a mathematical approach to understand how social technologies are impacting teenagers.

There is this emerging realization that technology is not just a tool but is an influential force that forms us and influences our societies.