Nationwide — Dorian Hollingsworth Jr., a 21-year-old native of Bronx, New York, is the Founder and Executive Director of Teen Care Network, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to changing the conversation around mental health in communities of color. Dorian is also a 2023 McDonald’s Black & Positively Golden Change Leader in partnership with KeKe Palmer.
Dorian’s passion for Mental Wellness and ensuring everyone has access to Mental Health Resources began back in 2018 when he caught wind of the suicide of a high school freshman in Bronx, NY. Impacting Dorian as a student in a high school at the time within the same borough, Dorian took to advocacy to make a change in his community and stand up.
With this birthed Teen Care Network – an organization whose mission is to bridge the gap between care and community by providing free mental health resources to teens while simultaneously equipping communities and families with the resources they need to uplift healthy mental health conversations and break stigmas in communities of color.
It is Dorian’s goal to bring about a world where we’ve reached Mental Wellness. A point where conversations about how we feel both physically and mentally are not frowned upon, and that everyone not only has the resources they need but somewhere to turn to for help.
In honor of the young teen’s memory and all the families this story is true for, Dorian and his organization Teen Care Network have launched a Community Impact Fund dedicated to making a change in communities of color. The Community Fund in honor will directly fund Teen Care Network’s efforts in communities of color. This fund will impact students and schools by bringing resources to students, school faculty, and the communities that encompass these schools. Support Teen Care Network on May 20th, 2023 for Day of Impact – a day dedicated to fulfilling the mission of the Community Impact Fund.
The Community Impact Fund’s mission will be to establish, elevate, and protect spaces and resources that promote black healing on the road to mental wellness. Through this impact fund, we also hope to run a few core programs that will directly impact the communities in which they’re hosted. Programs such as (but not limited to):
• Project Dreamer – a program that awakens the inner dreamer in students. This program allows students to create vision boards, business plans, and business pitches – students will also be prompted to create measurable goals that will be tracked by their teachers and/or their dean of students. Students who meet their goals will be entered to win a cash prize to be invested into the start of their business.
• Adopt-A-School is a program that is like Adopt-A-Highway, a program that encourages volunteers to keep a section of a highway free from litter. Adopt-a-school will work with schools registered and verified as Community Impact Schools; organizations will be encouraged to fund the school financially to help create more access to mental health resources at schools and create enriching programming that positively benefits the students and the community at large.
• Awakening Humanity (“A Renaissance”) is a program that welcomes the arts into spaces of black healing and wellness. This artistic renaissance will encompass music, art, self-care, and more. A space for black+brown people can come together to awaken joy.
• Gardens of Humanity is a gardening space. This gardening space will invite community members including teens, adults, and seniors! The garden will be a space of peace that encourages those that enter to feel the joys of the earth, re-center their minds, and woosah.
The Community Impact Fund will directly support schools in communities of color by:
• Providing financial stimulus to counseling departments to directly aid in bandwidth expansion.
• Providing/Hosting Mental health training for school teams; staff, faculty, and parents.
• Support creating an inclusive curriculum that educates students on their mental wellness and understanding of when to ask for help and where to turn.
• Hosting pop-up Community Impact Days to pour back into communities with resources through different events based on need (i.e., Feeding the Community for Thanksgiving, or providing Free Counseling Sessions for Mental Health Awareness Month, etc.).
• Elevating and uplifting spaces of black healing and black trauma.
• Fund school activities that encourage mental wellness for our black youth + create safe spaces for black healing.
Learn more about Teen Care Network’s Community Impact Fund and sow seed at cifund.org
Find a therapist in your area, share resources, sow a seed, and more at TeenCareNetwork.org
Stay up to date with the network on social media at @TeenCareNet
Connect with Dorian on Instagram @Doriann.H
For press inquiries, contact press@teencarenetwork.org
