Active Minds Announces its 100th Chapter

Dec 11, 2007 (Washington, DC) – As the 2007 fall semester is wrapping up for college students across the country, Active Minds is celebrating an historic milestone – its 100th campus chapter.

The College of St. Catherine in St. Paul/Minneapolis, Minnesota joins the Active Minds network as its 100th national chapter. Located in the Twin Cities, the College of St. Catherine is the nation’s largest and most comprehensive Catholic college for women. St. Kate’s joins the University of Minnesota at Twin Cities as just the second campus with an Active Minds chapter in the state of Minnesota.  Active Minds’ entire network of schools includes four member of the Ivy League, thirty-two schools with an enrollment of over 10,000 students, four technical schools and a law school.

“We are thrilled to welcome the College of St. Catherine into our chapter network. The hard working students and staff at St. Kate’s will complement our already-existing dedicated membership of Active Minds members on college and university campuses across this continent. They are joining a movement of young adult advocates who are truly making a difference in the fight against stigma and for the support of mental health for all students” said Active Minds, Inc. founder and Executive Director, Alison Malmon.

In 33 states plus the District of Columbia and Canada, Active Minds serves as the largest resource for college students seeking to educate their peers about issues of mental health and mental illness. In the past four years, the campus program has engaged over a thousand young adult mental health advocates and reached hundreds of thousands of students with educational and awareness-raising programming. Members of mental health task forces, outspoken advocates, and change-agents on campus, Active Minds’ student leaders are a tremendous force now on 100 campuses nationwide.

Plans are in place to expand the program to 300 college campuses by 2010.

About Active Minds, Inc.

Active Minds is the only national organization dedicated to utilizing the student voice to raise awareness about mental health on college campuses. In fewer than five years, Active Minds has become the “young adult voice” in mental health advocacy and the organizational catalyst for awareness programs on college and university campuses. The organization was founded in 2001 by Alison Malmon, then a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, following the suicide of her only sibling, twenty-two year old brother Brian Malmon. Troubled that her brilliant and popular brother had struggled with depression in silence, even though he maintained a full schedule of extra curricular activities and superior grades at Columbia University, Alison was convinced that stigma and lack of information kept Brian from seeking help. Determined to combat the stigma and address the lack of awareness about mental illnesses that most often strike young people at the pinnacle of their educational careers, Alison launched a program to promote mental health awareness on her campus. Just two years later, Alison created the 501(c)3 organization which now works to promote student advocacy and dialogue on college campuses nationwide.