Mental Health & Burnout
Understanding how stress, burnout, and emotional strain affect sustained engagement.
Youth-led · Mental Health · PolicySustaining People
Sustaining People
to Sustain Systems
Global Minds Initiative for Mental Health & Policy explores how youth mental health, civic engagement, intergenerational dialogue, and policy-informed thinking can help build more human-centered systems.
About
About Global Minds
Global Minds Initiative for Mental Health & Policy is a youth-led initiative exploring how mental well-being shapes participation in communities, service organizations, leadership spaces, and civic life. The initiative bridges research-informed dialogue, lived experience, and policy-oriented thinking to better understand how people can remain meaningfully engaged without becoming burned out or disconnected.
Core Focus Areas
Where our work lives
Civic Engagement & Service
Exploring what helps people continue showing up in community, leadership, and service spaces.
Policy & Systems Design
Translating lived experience and dialogue into more supportive, human-centered frameworks.
Our First Pilot
Sustaining People to Sustain Systems
In June 2026, Global Minds Initiative hosted its first virtual multigenerational dialogue on burnout, connection, and sustained engagement. The pilot brought together youth, adults, service leaders, coaches, and community voices to explore how mental well-being affects people's ability to stay engaged in school, work, service, leadership, and civic life.
Pilot 001
Burnout, Connection & Sustained Engagement
- Format
- Virtual multigenerational dialogue
- Hosted
- June 2026 · First completed pilot
- Participants
- Youth, students, adults, service leaders, coaches, and community voices.
Pilot Themes
From Conversation to Insight
Care Can Become Overextension
Burnout often emerges when people continue saying yes because the work matters, even when they are no longer being sustained by the systems around them.
Retention Is a Mental Health Issue
Sustained engagement in service organizations depends not only on recruitment, but on whether people feel supported enough to keep showing up.
Generations Need to Hear Each Other
Youth, adults, and older community members may describe burnout differently, but each group offers insight into what support, purpose, and connection can look like.
From Pilot to Model
An ongoing initiative
This first pilot is the beginning of a repeatable dialogue model. Global Minds is using participant reflections and discussion themes to refine future conversations, develop stronger facilitation tools, and explore how communities can better sustain the people who sustain service, leadership, and civic engagement.
Pilot 001
Burnout, Connection & Engagement
First completed multigenerational dialogue — June 2026.
Long-Term Goal
Research-Informed, Policy-Aware Dialogue Models
Repeatable conversations that help sustain people, service, and human-centered systems.
Future Dialogues
Core focus areas ahead
Youth Mental Health & Policy
From lived experience to stronger support systems.
Sustained Service & Civic Engagement
Helping people stay involved without becoming depleted.
Intergenerational Systems Design
Using dialogue to build more human-centered communities.
Future dialogue topics may also include digital well-being, online safety, cyberbullying prevention, and youth advocacy in partnership with aligned organizations.
FEATURED
Pilot Speakers & Contributors
Our first pilot featured voices across service leadership, executive coaching, burnout prevention, leadership development, and human-centered systems.
Speaker
Zachary Weaver
Zachary Weaver is the president of the Rotaract Club of Newport Beach-Global Service and the director of its Democracy in a Box program. He convenes Rotarians for Civic Participation gatherings and works to strengthen civic engagement through Rotary's Four-Way Test and conversations that help people feel heard. He centers youth leadership as vital to our future peace and sustainability.
Speaker
Sheryl Whitaker
Sheryl Raphael Whitaker is a renowned best-selling author, speaker, and certified executive coach who helps high-achieving leaders stop performing leadership and start living it — with clarity, alignment, and joy. As an ICF-certified executive coach and Founder & CEO of EdenAnthony Elite Talent Solutions LLC, she brings over 35 years of Fortune 500 leadership experience to every engagement.
Speaker
Kristen Crockett
With more than 20 years of experience in leadership and organizational development, Kristen Crockett is a leadership strategist, executive coach, and speaker who helps leaders and organizations see themselves and others from the inside out. She transforms how people and teams lead, connect, and create more impact in life, work, and beyond. She will share a personal story about burnout and the lessons it taught her about creating a legacy without sacrificing well-being.
Founder
Shreya Kumar
Meet the Founder
Shreya Kumar
Shreya Kumar is a youth mental health advocate, TEDx speaker, and founder of Global Minds Initiative for Mental Health & Policy. Her work examines mental health not only as an individual issue, but as a foundation for sustained service, civic participation, and systems change. Drawing from her speaking work at TEDx and RotaryXperience at EarthX, Shreya is building Global Minds as a platform for intergenerational dialogue, youth voice, and policy-informed approaches to more human-centered communities.
TEDx SpeakerYouth Mental Health AdvocateCivic Engagement / Policy AdvocateFounder, Global Minds Initiative
Speaking & Advocacy
Selected talks & appearances
TEDx Talk
It's Okay to Not Be Okay
RotaryXperience at EarthX
Sustaining People to Sustain Systems
Get Involved
Join the Initiative
Whether you're interested in membership, pilot dialogues, speaking, partnering, or volunteering — we'd love to hear from you.
Join the Initiative