NationSwell is excited to reintroduce our pilot NationSwell Fellows Accelerator Program, sponsored by Jon & Wendy Stahl, which offers young leaders the strategic support, connections and leadership development needed to turn their interventions into sustainable and meaningful interventions. This cohort has been moving on the four key areas of the program – building and refining a theory of change, building organizational structure and presence, stakeholder engagement  and storytelling. We are honored to remind our networks of the incredible fellows who have been working with us and introduce a new pair of co-founders joining this pilot program.


EMILY BACH (ANY PRONOUNS)

Emily Bach is an organizer and educator based in Oakland, California. Her research on community-based consent education has been presented across 9 universities, and they currently serve as a peer reviewer at the American Journal of Sexuality Education. Emily sits on the Board of Directors at SafeBAE, Stories of Consent’s fiscal sponsor. 


MAYA SIEGEL (SHE/HER)

Maya Siegel is a digital strategist based in Denver, Colorado. Her work focuses on narrative-centered initiatives to foster a more sustainable and equitable future. She currently serves as the Platforms Manager at FEMINIST, the largest (6M+ followers across platforms) women-owned nonprofit media platform for women, girls, and gender-expansive people, and is a founding board member at Intersectional Environmentalist. 

Together, they are the co-founders of Stories of Consent, the first and only national organization in the United States that uses a youth-led, peer-education model to provide consent education in states without educational mandates. In just a year and a half, they initiated conversations about consent with over 462,000 individuals and have implemented an educational model that impacts middle and high school students across 45 U.S. states. They are excited to be joining NationSwell’s pilot Accelerator Program.


ALEX ANG (SHE/HER)

Alex Ang is a content creator and mental health advocate living in Saint Paul, MN. Through her work, she is dedicated to increasing access to mental health resources and developing storytelling around cultural competency, anxiety awareness and workplace mental health. She currently sits on the NAMI StigmaFree Advisory Board for Workplace Mental Health, and is the host of a mental health podcast, a is for anxious. 

Through these last few months of the accelerator, she has been working on her project, Mental Health Mailboxes, a community-based campaign aimed at increasing access to free mental health resources and acts as a catalyst for mental health awareness, using the power of collective aid and resource exchange to curate a source of mental health stories and resources. The idea is a simple one: Place a Mental Health Mailbox in your community and watch as community-members populate its shelves with an abundance of resources, suited to each community’s culture and location.


JORGE ALVAREZ (HE/HIM)

Jorge Alvarez is a first-gen Latine Social Impact Strategist, Mental Health Advocate, & Creator who has taken his mental health advocacy from lecture halls on his college campus, to millions online, and even to The White House. After being recognized by MTV as 1 of 30 participants to be part of the inaugural Mental Health Youth Action Forum at The White House where he spoke alongside Selena Gomez, the U.S. First Lady, and the U.S. Surgeon General, Jorge went on to consult companies and nonprofits alike on campaign messaging, program development, and BIPOC/youth engagement strategies. Most recently, he advised MTV and sActive Minds, a youth mental health nonprofit, on their national mental health campaign called A.S.K.– the stop, drop, & roll for young people to emotionally support their friends! Online, he uses his love for storytelling to spark dialogue for collective reflection, unlearning limiting beliefs, and breaking cycles leading to his community of +130,000 across social platforms. While he loves creating, Jorge works directly with communities by speaking at venues, universities, and institutions across the U.S. to empower and educate young people and allies about mental health, social media, advocacy, and more. 


JAZMINE ALCON (SHE/HER)

Jazmine brings over 7 years of experience in the mental health advocacy space and is dedicated to transforming the mental health narrative to be more culturally relevant, engaging, and accessible. Her work has been rooted in empowering BIPOC communities, which she has executed through health equity, community, and marketing initiatives in the non-profit and corporate sectors. Jazmine is an Ilocana immigrant who believes that storytelling is fundamental in creating systemic and collective change in how we address youth mental health. Jazmine holds a Bachelor of Science in Public Health with a minor in Health and Society. She is also the co-founder of AAPI Mental Health, a digital platform dedicated to redefining the mental health conversation in the Asian and Pacific Islander community. In her free time, Jazmine likes to create art, hang out with her friends and cat, and be outdoors!

Together, the pair have been building on their work in the Accelerator Program. Titled, I’ve Been Meaning to Tell you, this campaign consists of a non-scripted interview-style video web series featuring difficult yet sincere intergenerational dialogue between BIPOC parents or guardians and their children (ages 18-26). Given the impact of cultural, ethnic, and racial nuance, each episode will spotlight how vulnerable and intimate conversations between parents and children of color can lead to a place of understanding. This campaign will not only invoke emotion and demonstrate that having intimate and vulnerable conversations between different generations is possible and why it’s important to do so, but it will also inspire others to have these same conversations. Ultimately, our goal is to use digital content to drive traffic toward culturally relevant resources with actionable next steps with viewers to continue the conversation.

Learn more about the NationSwell Fellows Program here.