While most kindergarten students are scribbling in coloring books or riding their tricycles, 5- and 6-year-old students at La Jolla Country Day School are engaging in conversations around a topic even many adults find uncomfortable to confront: mental health. During LJCDS’s annual Mental Health Day last Wednesday, UC San Diego’s Shift Towards Hope chapter held its first-ever event: a book reading.
Over 320 LJCDS students gathered to hear Shift Towards Hope members present a colorful picture book on anxiety titled “The Big Let Go.” The book captures the difficult emotions a balloon named Benny confronts when he is too scared to fly away on his own.
“I was really surprised that they were so engaged even though I didn’t ask any questions,” said Lucero Gutierrez, second-year student and Shift Towards Hope outreach director. “Working with these children made me feel like, ‘Wow, this is actually real, and we can actually make a change in this community.’”
In September 2025, University of South Florida recent graduates Jayden Haggler and Donavin Hansberry founded Shift Towards Hope, a national mental health nonprofit that aims to decrease mental health stigma by producing and distributing books on the subject for elementary school children. Haggler and Hansberry co-authored “The Big Let Go” and soon began working with Gutierrez to launch 20 collegiate chapters nationwide dedicated to holding local book readings.
After the book reading, kids chatted and colored in a “Shield of Hope” worksheet that detailed coping mechanisms they could use for stress in their own lives. UCSD’s Shift Towards Hope volunteers created this worksheet from scratch to help the kids internalize the book’s message of managing stress in a healthy way.
Briony Chown, head of LJCDS’s Lower School, shared the importance of helping students understand these concepts.
“They initially read the book, and now, they’re putting it into practice,” Chown said to The UCSD Guardian as kids bustled around her. “We know that our students need skills to be able to navigate the world. We know the importance of resilience and the growth mindset, and so, giving students the opportunity to start to think about this now is really important.”
After growing up with little access to mental health resources, Francesca Signorelli, third-year student and director of operations at the UCSD chapter, hopes to increase accessibility by removing age as a barrier to engagement.
“I’m from Montana; the town where I’m from is extremely small, and in that town, those kids are not getting access to understanding what anxiety is, even though it’s a normal emotion,” Signorelli said. “That’s why we’re focusing on kids because that accessibility is generally lower for children, and setting that stable foundation for them to build off of is extremely beneficial.”
For college-aged volunteers, the nonprofit also offers a tangible way to help their communities while gaining real-world experience in the field of psychology.
“I felt like a lot of clubs on campus are just generally psychology-focused and not directly about mental health education or awareness,” Signorelli said.
For Shift Towards Hope at UC San Diego, this event is just the beginning. Over the next year, UCSD chapter members plan to collaborate with Haggler and Hansberry to help write, illustrate, and produce future books. Signorelli and the Shift Towards Hope team are proving that no one is too young to treat themselves and others with empathy and compassion. By making these tools more accessible, Shift Towards Hope aims to build a future where mental health literacy is universally valued, regardless of age.