Creative brief

Overview

Mental Health Over Dinner is an in-person social experience that starts hard conversations about mental health with friends and family over the dinner table. It’s inspired by Death Over Dinner, which has hosted more than a million dinners on death and grief using scripts and discussion guides from its website. The goal is to reduce stigma and improve access to support by moving the conversation to a shared meal.

Objectives

• Reduce stigma around mental health.
• Create access to conversations about it, starting with college students.
• Connect students to campus resources through peer-led discussion.
• Package the model so schools and employers can adopt it.

Problem statement

Many college students and adults with depression, anxiety, or other conditions never get help because of stigma and hard-to-find resources. Peer-led dinner conversations could reduce stigma, educate, and connect people to support. The project’s job was to design a framework and strategy for bringing that model to campuses.

Scope

In scope: engagement strategy and messaging, an interactive platform for scripts and stories separate from the online experience the nonprofit was already building, an implementation plan for colleges, and deliverables the founder could use to launch. Out of scope: clinical script development, the website’s own UX, and new partnerships.

Audience

College students first, with an eye to workplace wellness later. About 19 million students were enrolled in U.S. colleges in 2020; two-thirds are under 25; most are Gen Z, mobile-first, and value authenticity and purpose from the organizations they engage with. Anxiety and depression are common in this group, and young people report far less time with friends than the same age group did in the early 2000s.

Messaging goals

Know: that mental health conditions are treatable, where campus support exists, what common signs look like, and that healing tends to happen in community. Feel: supported, connected, and comfortable enough to raise hard topics with people they trust. Do: host or join a dinner, talk with friends and family, use campus resources, and pass it on.

How we’d measure it

Dinners hosted and platform visits, adoption at additional universities, participant feedback, campus resource use, and media coverage.

Questions for the founder

• What’s the target launch date, and what are universities asking for?
• How are prompts designed to prevent oversharing and harm? What are the guardrails?
• One universal program or a customized one per campus?
• How is impact measured today in a decentralized model?
• If a student uses the program through a university, what is reported back? What are the privacy expectations?
• How will each campus’s stakeholders be engaged and brought on board?

Next steps

Get answers to the above, keep learning about mental health communication, generate options, check them with the founder and team, and write the proposal. Those steps became the Kiosks for Connection project.