All photography provided by Jared Chambers
We have developed a first-of-its-kind "Wellness Day" at Southwest High School, in the process creating a community centered on respect and acceptance.
Our Mission
Wellness First MN is dedicated to reshaping the conversation and environment surrounding mental health in the Minnesota education system. Wellness is a all-encompassing term, one that touches on physical health, relationship health, and mental health. Though mental health is slowly becoming de-stigmatized in the public realm, there is still a long ways to go on the road to seeing mental health as something that affects all of us, whether directly or indirectly. Wellness First MN seeks to develop workshops that encourage youth to redefine wellness as something that they should feel excited to talk about, rather than feeling that there is something "wrong" with them. By starting the process at a young age, students can take control of their well-being and approach any mental obstacles with a proactive confidence rather than fear.
“ I am a parent of 2 kids at SWHS (senior and freshman) . . . You address the mental health, social, emotional, stress-reducing needs of our students and also incorporate the arts, sensory, mindfulness practice, music, animals—featuring the kids owning their own participation and progress—it is AMAZING. I feel like this is so at the forefront of a vision for public schools, and we’ve got it at SWHS. Please know that you are appreciated and applauded. Thank you. ”
What Wellness Means To US
June Thiemann is the author of “All in the Asylum; The Lazy Person’s Guide to Self-Preservation.” She grew up on a dead end in Peoria, Illinois where her father was a civic leader and realtor who appraised the land for the local mental health facility that would later become a home away from home for several siblings. Her mother, a New Yorker and Northfield Mount Hermon School graduate, managed to get out of bed on enough days to not be taken “away” to a psychiatric facility as her mother had been in 1932.
June graduated from Carleton College in 1984 and began writing in 1991, after giving birth to a son. Naming him after a brother who committed suicide, June began to put other names to the absences in her family. She couldn’t complete the project until she figured out a strategy to keep herself and her kids from disappearing. June is now a mental health proactivist and has helped to spearhead the first-ever Wellness Day at Southwest H.S. She has a Master’s in American Studies from the University of Minnesota.