Our goal with this project was to increase awareness about the importance of sleep and stress management. We decided to focus on this topic because all of our group members were interested in this topic, and because we are all in high school and have experienced these problems ourselves. Throughout this year, we felt that we have learned some effective ways to calm down before bed and to de-stress, and hopefully we have spread those messages to the rest of our school. We all have grown as individuals and as team members and are truly proud of all that we have accomplished.
We were so surprised by the amount of new people we were able to start conversations with about the importance of sleep in just one year. One focus that we will target next year will be to expand our discussions with 9th graders in order to take more advocative steps toward preventative action. Although, as mentioned before, we were proud of presenting to 6 health classes of 30+ students and the entire junior class at John Marshall High School, we did not focus specifically on freshman attending our school. However, we were also excited that our membership increased by 30+ people including students of all different ethnicities, genders, and ages.
Another area of improvement would be to involve more community organizations. Although we did reach out to the Los Feliz Neighborhood Association and Project Sleep, we definitely want to visit a local sleep clinic as a club some time in the near future! :)
We also would like to note that we have utilized social media to the best of our ability. We realize that our society has become increasingly technologically advanced, and almost everyone in the U.S. has access to a smartphone. Therefore, we decided to make Instagram a resource for our members. We tried to better connect with them there through posting about sleep tips, march dates, event flyers, and most important to our cause, night routines. Our night routines have been viewed by a cumulative of 240+ people so far, so we know that we are impacting many people. We also frequently posted on Remind (as seen below) to make sure that everyone remained informed about our meetings and events.
Qualitative Evidence:
- "What I like about this club are the fun events, such as making face masks, stress balls, and the narcolepsy presentation. I hope we will have more events like these!" - "I have really enjoyed this club, especially the guest speaker who told us her experience with narcolepsy. It allowed me to learn something I knew nothing about." - "I love how friendly all the other members are because it really makes this club feel like a family. The snacks are great too!"