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Cope Community Services: Local Efforts in Mental Health - by Katelyn Vessey

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    187947

    • Katelyn Vessey at Pima Community College
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    Cope Community Services is an organization designed to help everyone in the community, located in Tucson, Arizona. Cope helps with physical and mental health for all ages. They help make appointments, find specialist, and help with financial aspects (Cope). They provide may resources including housing for those in need. Cope is a nonprofit organization that makes a difference in each life they touch. No matter what someone is going through Cope is there to help in any way that they can.

    Mental health challenges can take over anybody, it effects all ages. It can affect everything in their life, school, work, social activities, and family. As teenagers start to be affected by mental health it is important to get the conversation going. Mental health can be a sensitive for a lot of people, therefore, it is often not talked about. I asked my friend Brian if in school anyone has ever talked to the students about mental health. His response was, “No, I never been talked to about mental health”. Schools in New York, Virginia, Florida, and New Jersey all started to create mental health into their health classes (Elliott). These states are doing more for the mental health of their students. The schools doing this intend to improve the mental health of their students.

    How does the mental health in student relate to Cope? Well, Cope is not just for adults, they also offer youth services. The youth service at Cope is called Thrive (Cope). Thrive offers a safe, supportive place for youth and families through difficult times. It could be from helping understand themselves to case management. Thrive helps the public with anger management, family support, parenting, friendship and more. They offer in person groups and zoom calls for some. For most of the groups they start after 3, therefore it is accessible for teenagers in school. The groups are Monday through Friday all at their Alvernon location. Cope has another youth program for ages 13-17 for opioid dependency treatment called Lift. Lift and the other youth services are useful resources teenagers can take advantage of.

    The issue is that students do not know this organization is available to them. To fix this issue Copes resources need to be talked about more. Like the states that started incorporating mental health with their health lessons, Cope could start to be incorporated in schools. Even just having somebody that came to schools to talk about their available resources would help. My friend Brian said, “If I had someone tell me about these resources or someone to help me understand my emotions would be better off now”. I think that many students feel this way but may be too afraid to reach out and find help. In my high school health class, we had someone come talk about sex ed, I imagine Cope could do a similar approach. One day a week a lady came in and taught us about sex ed, the difference Cope can talk about what it means to be mentally healthy and resources available.

     Cope is great organization with what they do; one down fall is many do not know about the great work they do. Incorporating Cope into schools can improve mental health tremendously in youth becoming adults. It also can help get the word out about Cope; they do not do a lot of advertising therefore their main way of delivering awareness is person to person communication. However, knowing that if Cope gains more awareness, they might not be able to financially help everyone in need. They have a couple options; they can go to government for grants, or they couple go to larger companies for ownerships.

    Cope Community Services Organization is available for all ages, providing mental and physical health benefits. They offer help with finding and making appointments with specialist and connecting someone to groups. Cope has a ton of groups for the youth to help with anything they need. However, Cope is not well enough known, if they partner with schools both Cope and the students will benefit.

    Citations

    “Cope Community Services, Inc. - Tucson, AZ.” COPE Community Services, Inc. - Tucson, AZ, https://www.copecommunityservices.org/.

    Elliott, Kimberley Susanne. “Mental Health Promotion in Schools: What Should Pennsylvania Do?” D, 16 May 2022, http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/42906/.

    “Frequently Asked Questions - Cope Community Services, Inc...” COPE Community Services, Inc. - Tucson, AZ, 28 May 2013, https://www.copecommunityservices.or...ked-questions/.

    This page titled Cope Community Services: Local Efforts in Mental Health - by Katelyn Vessey is shared under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Katelyn Vessey at Pima Community College.