The Optimist Daily · 13 hours ago

Podcast Transcript October 9th, 2026— (Guest Interview) a Place to breathe: Inside #CreateConnectCare, the Youth Mental Health Program Giving Young...

When a 12-year-old girl in Wyoming sat down to write a creative essay for a youth mental health program, she put into words things no one around her had ever known. The submission couldn't be sent in - but a team of counselors was on their way to her by that afternoon. "That," says Kathy Saulitis, who built and runs #CreateConnectCare, "is exactly what our program is about." Across three years and more than 3,000 submissions - poems, drawings, songs, and essays from young people in all 50 states and 15 countries - the program has operated on a quiet but powerful premise: that creativity can open doors in a young person that nothing else can reach. Seventeen-year-old Lilly Kacziba, one of fewer than 20 teenagers selected for the program's National Mental Health Youth Council, offers a gentle corrective to any adult who has felt shut out by a teenager's silence - it's not that they don't want to talk, she explains, but that they are often feeling something for the first time and haven't yet found the words. What this story quietly insists is that young people are not pulling away from connection; they are waiting, often desperately, for a place safe enough to begin.