From June 2023 to April 2024, CLASP and TYP Collaborative provided technical assistance to community advocates in three localities: Charleston, SC, Gulfport, MS, and Tulsa, OK. Our goal was to increase access to equitable school-based mental health services.

We used Community-Based System Dynamics to understand what upstream factors impacted student mental health outcomes and what was needed to make policy changes. System dynamics is a set of tools that elicit and represent mental models that members of a system hold about different dynamic problems, and allow us a way to test those models. In this case, the system was the school district. The goal of system dynamics is to understand how different parts of a system interact to see what the levers of change are and what’s holding the system in place.

View the full factsheet.