When Organizacion Latino-Americana (OLA) and Stony Brook University put out a survey in 2020 asking what young people needed, “what most of the respondents reported” was that they wanted “someone who’s anonymous and confidential that they can reach out to during times of distress,” said Anastasia Gochnour, a licensed clinical social worker who directs OLA’s Youth Connect program.
Of the 271 people who responded, 69.5 percent of them were high school students. The idea for Youth Connect, a free and anonymous 24/7 bilingual mental health support hotline in operation since 2022, grew out of that survey.
“We’re going to put the thing out there that doesn’t exist, exactly the way students have said they want it, not the way I want it as a mom, not the way the schools want it because they’re worried about liability or they think they’ve already got it done. We’re going to do it the way that youth have told us they want us to do it,” said Minerva Perez, OLA’s executive director.
OLA works with schools and other community institutions to make sure that middle and high school students are aware that the service exists and that they can call or text at any time. “That’s really our goal: to just be able to make sure that students know that that there’s this resource,” said Ms. Gochnour, “and right now, the way that we’ve discovered is most effective for doing that is to get ourselves into the classrooms.”
OLA has so far worked with 16 schools across the East End, including seven middle schools and nine high schools, and with local libraries, and even law enforcement, so that officers can pass on the hotline information in relevant situations.
One of the main goals of the program is to encourage teenagers to take advantage of the various support systems already available to them in the community.
OLA envisions this as a “five pointed star” model, with the student at the
center, surrounded by peers, schools, parents, houses of worship, and care providers.
“OLA is an essential resource for our students and staff,” Adam Fine, the East Hampton School District superintendent, said by email Tuesday morning. “Our partnership has provided our students with support they otherwise would not receive. Youth Connect provides yet another avenue for students to seek help.”
According to a youth engagement report released by OLA in January, between September 2022 and December 2024 the program reached 10,146 young people either through the helpline or in-person presentations. More than half (5,480) were high school students, 2,095 were middle school students, 1,994 were English as a new language students. Just over 500 of the young people reached by Youth Connected had called the helpline directly.
The program drew inspiration from the work OLA did during the pandemic o provide crisis counseling services through New York Project Hope, funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “We saw how much we could do with that model,” Ms. Perez said. “These were people that are from the community that you’re serving, they are trained, they are crisis counselors, and this is a model that is fully accepted, adopted, you know, championed by FEMA, by New York State.”
Following that model allows OLA to distinguish the work it does from that of a clinical counseling service. “It’s a model of providing emotional support that’s nonclinical that really is just available for whatever a student is going through,” Ms. Gochnour said.
The counselors’ “primary strength is that they are from the East End,” she
continued. “Most of them have grown up here, most of them are parents here honestly, and so I think that there’s an intimacy to the support that we’re offering.” OLA also runs in-house crisis management and active listening sessions for the counselors to prepare them to help.
Although the program has grown rapidly, there are still a few places that are hesitant to work with OLA. “I don’t think it’s only coming from a place that’s like, ‘I don’t want our students to have this great access to this great thing that’s going to help them at 10 o’clock at night when they’re freaking out,’ “ she said, but rather from “this hyper-protective thing that is unfortunately what is getting in the way of students accessing, even right then and there in their own school district, some of the support that they might need.”
Students just may not feel comfortable approaching school employees or their parents with their issues, Ms. Perez said. Schools “have got great social workers,” who can be a great resource, “if only someone would just show up and say, ‘Hey, I need your help.’ But that whole space leading up to it is one that can be very daunting.”
OLA wants to augment that built-in support system, and in some cases point students toward it. “If we’re talking to a youth and they want to share with us where they go to school, then we might be able to say very honestly, ‘Hey, we actually know some of the team that does this kind of work and they’re really great and maybe there is a way you can make a phone call,’ “ Ms. Perez said. “We want to try to . . . bring them back into the fabric of a trusted environment because we do not want to have them feeling isolated from that school.”
Looking ahead, OLA wants to expand its efforts to include more family centered work. It is currently running a pilot program with Human Understanding and Growth Services (HUGS) through the Hampton Bays School District that includes a 12-week workshop for 12 families focused on improving communication between parents and teenagers. It hopes to bring this program to East Hampton in the fall.
And Ms. Perez hopes Youth Connect will reach even more school districts going forward.
“We want to learn from districts so they can share with us more of what they want to see,” she said, highlighting the importance of working in tandem with the schools. “Because maybe we’ll do our workshops differently in their schools than we do in other schools based on what that school might need more of or less of.”
The Youth Connect hotline can be reached at 631-810-9010.