Alliance for Girls Mental Health & Safety Study
is led by youth researchers to examine how their peers understand and experience mental health, and how their sense of safety affects their wellbeing.
PROJECT UPDATES
From March to May 2026, we’re hosting youth storytelling sessions and disseminating an anonymous survey to youth across the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn how you can be a community partner by either helping us spread the word or hosting a storytelling circle in your area!
The Study
is a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project led by girls and gender-expansive youth of color (ages 14–24) in the Bay Area. The project explores how young people understand and experience mental health; and how their sense of physical, emotional, and spiritual safety affects their well-being.
Youth co-researchers are guiding every stage of the process—from shaping the research questions to collecting, analyzing, and sharing the findings.
The goal is to ensure that the voices of girls and gender-expansive youth of color are centered and that the resulting insights lead to real, community-driven solutions that improve safety and mental health support for youth.
OUR RESEARCH Team
is comprised of girls, gender-expansive people, and women of color from the Bay Area who actively challenge power imbalances. Youth are not just participants but co-designers, partners, and decision-makers.
-
Alyvia DeAngelo grew up in Pittsburgh, Penn Hills, in a home where mental health was dismissed as laziness, weakness, or something made up. When she moved to California in eighth grade, she was introduced to spaces where mental health was openly discussed, and for the first time, she felt warmth and a sense of belonging. Alyvia came to realize that, especially in the Black community, struggling with mental health is often stigmatized or “not allowed” — particularly for Black men. Through her journey and community organizing work, she witnessed how important creating spaces of care, understanding, and accountability is. She is passionate about supporting young people in accessing healing resources, building resilience, and finding their voices.
-
Irina is a muxerista abolitionist jotx living in Sacramento, CA with their two children and partner. She organizes for freedom fiercely using their expertise in Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and Community-based participatory research (CBPR).
Their justice work began in grassroots immigrant rights organizing and in studying the strategies of intersectional abolitionist feminists like Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, and Grace Lee Boggs. Organizing in the community deepened her commitment to transformative justice. After leading youth programming in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and teaching as a high school teacher, they realized organizing alongside youth is essential for us as a society to move towards our liberation.
Irina earned a Bachelors in Women Studies from the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and a Masters in Social Work from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
Conducting YPAR projects led by Black, Indigenous, youth of color in the Twin Cities taught them that co-creating, co-organizing, and co-conspiring with youth can radically transform our communities and create systems that will bring joy, abundance, love, and healing.
At Alliance for Girls, Irina mobilizes towards freedom with girls and gender-expansive youth of color throughout the Bay Area using YPAR and CBPR as the Participatory Research Director.
-
Chuan Xin Loh is a passionate and empathetic Psychology major who is strongly dedicated to mental health advocacy and peer support. She is experienced in community engagement through volunteering and leadership and is committed to reducing stigma and promoting dignified access to resources. She is dedicated to fostering safe, inclusive spaces that support the well-being of peers and underserved communities.
-
Joanna Núñez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at California State University, Sacramento. She is a queer Chicana feminist activist scholar-mother. She is the proud daughter of immigrant parents from Baja California, Mexico. She received her BA/BSW in Women’s Studies and Social Work from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and her Master's and Ph.D. in Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her primary research interests are in feminist and queer mothering, Jotería-led social movements, Chicana feminist epistemologies and pedagogies, and community-based and youth participatory methods. Her work explores the connection between home and intimate community-building practices in facilitating movements for social transformation. She is published in the Association of Mexican American Educators Journal, The Handbook of Latinos in Education, and in Transmovimientos: Latinx Queer Migrations, Bodies, and Spaces.
-
Coatlupe Martinez is a visionary Indigenous two-spirit student leader, facilitator, and organizer with eight years of experience. They are dedicated to cultivating community wellness and healing justice, deeply integrating Indigenous ancestral medicine and collective care as forms of liberation from systemic colonial systems of harm that target Black and Brown gender-expansive youth.
-
Priyanka Kalidindi (she/her) is a senior at the University of California, Berkeley, where she majors in conservation and resource studies. She is passionate about mental health support, accessibility, and public safety-focused community development. Drawing on her experiences living in the East and South Bay, she wants to examine various ways to create and implement policies to improve access to mental health support and public safety resources for women of color and marginalized communities where such access may be stigmatized.
-
Gracy Mora (she/her) is a fifth-year undergraduate student at UC Berkeley majoring in Social Welfare. Originally from Oakland, she is a proud Bay Area native who is passionate about resource accessibility and behavioral health. Her academic and professional work focuses on harm reduction education and improving recovery treatment for young people seeking to change their relationships with substances. More broadly, she is deeply interested in exploring the reciprocal relationship between public services and the communities they serve, and in understanding how community and systemic structures both shape and are shaped by the people within them.
-
Susanna Chen (she/they) is a youth researcher from Union City in the East Bay. She is passionate about blending activism, education, and STEM to create more inclusive and equitable spaces. Growing up in a low-income, immigrant household as the eldest daughter, Susanna began working at 14 and has experienced firsthand the challenges of navigating financial responsibility, accessing affirming mental health support, and seeking representation and inclusivity in education. As a queer young person, she understands how intersecting identities shape belonging, safety, and well-being.
Her passion for this work really deepened in high school (2021-2024), when James Logan’s Ethnic Studies and Social Justice (ESSJ) program transformed how she understood systems and institutions. She went on to spend a year (2023-2024) with PEERS (Peers Envisioning and Engaging in Recovery Services, Oakland, CA) as a youth fellow, focusing on mental health empowerment, and the following year (2024-2025) with SAVE (Safe Alternatives to Violent Environments, Fremont, CA), as a part of their youth empowerment group, Team STYT, where she facilitated community education workshops on relationship violence prevention.
Through the YPAR project, Susanna hopes to uplift the voices of girls and gender-expansive youth and push for systemic change that treats mental health and safety as fundamental rights. In the bigger picture, she aspires to bridge this work with her passion for STEM. She believes that too often, students from diverse backgrounds, especially women and gender-expansive people in male-dominated fields, are asked to set aside parts of their identity to belong. To truly create change, she envisions bridging technological innovation with social justice and public policy to ensure solutions are accessible, compassionate, and community-centered. She is 18 and currently in her second year of college, studying bioengineering and ethnic studies with goals of being an engineer, activist, and educator. She's a little introverted, but she's always excited to learn, get to know others, and go grab (or make her own) matcha and desserts to share!
Research Values
-
We are responsible for participants' privacy, dignity, and agency within this study. Honoring vulnerability means ensuring that sharing leads to collective impact, not harm.
-
We welcome many forms of knowledge—ancestral, spiritual, embodied, and academic. We commit to slowing down, asking what terms and ideas mean to different people in our community, and honoring the values they hold.
-
As youth researchers, we commit to radical honesty—with each other and with participants—while practicing care, gentleness, and consent in our communication.
-
Our curiosity is not about surveillance or extraction; it is about deep listening, wonder, and a desire to understand people’s truths on their own terms.
-
Our collective strength comes from reciprocity and care. We step in when others cannot, and we trust our peers to hold us when we need rest. Interdependence is a practice of solidarity, not charity.
Contact uS
For questions or to learn more about the study, please contact AFG’s Director of Participatory Research, Irina Nuñez, at irina@alliance4girls.org.
“I wanted to join YPAR because... in [this BIPOC] community, there's a lot of stigma around mental health, and it makes it a lot harder for people to open up or ask for help. And I wanted to break that stigma.”
— YPAR Team Member