Reaching Out for Resources
Dork Dancing started to advocate for mental health as a type of mental health awareness campaign. Locally, the campaign is seeming to work. People in the community know about Dork Dancing and our intention to be helpful with issues related to mental health. So, people are coming to us for help with specific mental health concerns and mental health cases.
This was an unexpected consequence of dancing. We never imagined people (strangers included) reaching out to us to help problem solve mental health risks in the community, but we are being asked to play a role in this. This is good, it means our campaign is working. We want people to reach out to us as a kind of mental health resource because we want to help.
Admittedly, however, we are still figuring out how to best do that. We are still limited in our capacity to deliver mental health solutions. For now, we are trying to make the right connections.
People inside and out of our community are coming together to try and collect helpful information. As a community, we have been influential in the formation & composition of a Mental Health of Da Nang group. Its resource ecosystem mapping, trying to put the right names, contacts, and people together.
This initiative and idea is led by a number of people, coming from different points of views, experiences, and perspectives. For us at Dork Dancing, we are contributing to the conversation with an observance of community need. People are approaching us for help and we are approaching this new group as a kind of resource to take things further.
Here, you can see an example of what this looks like. Person A reaches out to Dork Dancing. Dork Dancing consults this new Mental Health of Da Nang group for help. Group helps address the concerns of Person A. We are just starting to develop a system, or network, to more efficiently funnel a variety of mental health cases to the right places, depending on the need. We are working to hopefully create a website that can most efficiently help.
Dork Dancing is currently not equipped to solve these problems on our own. We are just a community of people dancing for mental health, who can relate and empathize to mental health concerns. In cases of emergency, we are scrambling to find people who might be in a better position to take meaningful action.
Dork Dancing hopes to identify and/or develop more mental health resources (connections, education, partnerships, etc.) for people in the community. We don’t exactly have the answers or solutions now, but we care about your mental health needs and are actively working to help where we can.