Dear Friends and Supporters of the Coalition for Student Wellbeing,
Today marks our second birthday at the Coalition for Student Wellbeing. Our second year marked exponential growth of the network of students and higher ed leaders coming together through the Coalition to advance student health and wellbeing nationwide.
That growth has translated directly to action: since launching our national campaign to add the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline to student IDs at the start of 2026, 400,000 more college students now carry this potentially lifesaving resource in their pockets.
In addition to growing our impact, the Coalition has also expanded its capacity and resources thanks to the generosity of our institutional funders, partner organizations, and grassroots donors. As a result, the Coalition’s team has grown to include six student contractors, helping us execute our vision, and I am honored to now be working full-time in my role as Executive Director. This opportunity is not one I take lightly, and it is truly a privilege to have the chance to make an impact on an issue that is so personal to me.
As we reflect on our second year, I am honored to share the following update on our achievements this year.
Reflecting On The Coalition’s 2nd Year: What We’ve Accomplished
We welcomed a new cohort of the Council on Student Wellbeing, continuing to build a national leadership body of student advocates dedicated to improving mental health outcomes in higher education. Read more about the council here.
Our student advocacy network has grown to 125 institutions across 41 states, a testament to how far student-led advocacy can travel when students see themselves reflected in the work.
This year, we launched our first-ever national advocacy campaign, focused on adding the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline to student ID cards. Since January, this change has been made on over 400,000 student IDs nationwide. We worked to build a student advocacy toolkit that equips campus leaders to implement this change on their campuses, and led direct advocacy with higher education administrators in states where this initiative is not yet required by law.
Our Substack continued to serve as a platform for students to share their lived experience and ideas directly with administrators, publishing 22 pieces this year. Given the growing interest and volume of student submissions, we’re planning to soon increase our publishing frequency to weekly. You can read and subscribe to our Substack here.
We also hosted our first educational event geared directly toward students, rather than administrators. Our virtual Student Leader Forum on Promoting Campus Health and Wellbeing provided tailored education and insight to incoming student leaders on how to best effectuate change on their campuses. The forum featured a panel with Dr. Jay Bernhardt, President of Emerson College, offering a president’s perspective on what makes student partnership effective; Dr. Kent Willis, Senior Vice President of Enrollment & Student Affairs at Stephen F. Austin University and former Student Body President; Edgar Loya, former Student Body President at the University of Texas at El Paso; and Dr. Tracey D. Ford, Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs at The University of Texas System.
We were also honored to be featured in three national TV ad campaigns in partnership with the Coalition to Empower our Future. The campaigns spotlighted the Coalition’s work and the students behind it, with individual ads featuring Coalition leaders Shriya Garg, Nestory Ngolle, and me, putting a face to the movement and reaching audiences far beyond our usual advocacy channels.
We continued to amplify student voices by showing up where the conversation on student wellbeing is happening. We co-hosted a Student Wellbeing Town Hall ahead of the new academic year with the LearningWell Coalition and UERU to better inform academic decision-makers about the student experience. During Mental Health Awareness Month, the Coalition for Student Wellbeing spoke at two Capitol Hill briefings with our partner organizations and the U.S. Senate Mental Health Caucus and the U.S. House Mental Health Caucus. We also partnered with the Association of College and University Housing Officers on a webinar exploring the impact of loneliness on wellbeing, and teamed up with Trellis Strategies on “Collaborating for Change,” a webinar on innovative policies to support student wellbeing, and with Active Minds on “Turn Your Student ID Into a Lifeline.”
We joined Trellis Strategies’ Mental Health in College Summit in person, where students from the Coalition and one of our advisory board members participated in a panel on the state of student wellbeing. I also had the honor of speaking at the launch of the 2026 World Happiness Report in Washington, D.C., for a fireside chat on youth mental health, alongside a stage that included former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, foreign diplomats, and members of Congress.
Representatives of the Coalition for Student Wellbeing also participated in mental health roundtables in California, Florida, Texas, Utah, and Washington, D.C., bringing student voices into the room with local decision-makers.
For the first time, we hosted our own reception in Austin, TX, where we welcomed over 70 members of our community, students, administrators, donors, and partners, together in one room. We’re deeply grateful to Greg and Arellana Levenson for hosting us. Seeing so much of our community gathered in person for the first time, in one room, was a reminder of just how much this movement has grown.
We are proud of the scale of this progress, but these numbers tell only part of the story. They represent students sharing their experiences and ideas, leaders willing to listen and act, institutions committed to doing better, and relationships built across higher education and public policy around a shared purpose.
None of this work happens in isolation. We are deeply grateful to the students, institutional leaders, policymakers, partners, advisors, and supporters who have contributed their time, expertise, trust, and voices to this mission. What we have built over the past two years has been built together.
With hope and gratitude,
Carson J. Domey
Executive Director
Coalition for Student Wellbeing (C4SW)