Students Create Mental Health Lounge in Brockville 

Submitted by Nanda Loredo, Fine Arts student 

Hiring students is a great way to introduce them to experiential learning and work ethics. They can be supported by providing tasks that help them gain the most practice related to the program they are studying, which could possibly lead to facilitating the transition between their career path and job finding. 
Students are employed all around the St. Lawrence College (SLC) campus which gives them the chance to gain new experiences and the opportunity to use applicable knowledge. Recently, at the Brockville Campus Library, students working as Library Assistants are delegated to tasks that are useful and appealing depending on our program and personal interests, which lead us to explore our skills. 

The latest accomplishment that we are proud to announce is the creation of the Mental Health Matters Lounge. A couple of students were asked to help develop the idea and the space. One of the students who made this possible was Mehtab Bains who is in the Mental Wellness and Addictions Worker program at the Brockville Campus. She oversaw the research proposal for the new space which included investigating how a space dedicated to mental health would contribute to students’ wellbeing and how it has helped in other community spaces. 

After the proposal and research was completed, I, a Fine Arts student, oversaw the graphic and artistic component of the project. Mehtab provided the concept and general layout idea. With this, I refined and planned the art that would be displayed in the Mental Health Matters Lounge, and used all the tools Adobe Express provides, including the AI generator, which was mainly used for image selection.  

While my primary focus is art, I am also interested in design and writing. Through my learning process, I have realized that the best way to learn a skill is through practice. This opportunity was a great hands-on learning task where I not only was able to apply my knowledge, but also got to use it in a different environment. I refined my skills in color and element design with the layout and given specifications. My goal was to create a space where people would feel safe and calm, so I decided to approach this with light blue and warm yellow colours, making a balance between cold and warm, while converging all sections of the wall with each other.  

Lastly, the Mental Health Matters Lounge is having a great result. Students are participating and we are receiving positive feedback. We are proud of how we worked together as students from different fields to exercise our specialties. 

SLC Libraries engaged us in activities that supported and enhanced our learning experience with the result being a safe space for all the SLC Brockville community to engage in conversations about our mental wellbeing. We wrote about this experience with the hope that the greater college community would do the same with their student employees.