by Aneela Idnani, Laurie Healy, and Dustin Bruzenak | at MinneBar 14 | 3:45 – 4:30 in Challenge | View Schedule
Was your 10th grade health class lacking mental health education? Are you now interested in helping change attitudes towards mental illnesses?
Then this session is for you.
Mental illness effects one in five adults and one in five youth in any year. Lifetime prevalence is 50% so it’s important to learn more about mental illness if you’re an employer, family member, friend, the general public or someone managing a mental health problem.
In this session, Creating Caring Communities, Kay King from NAMI Minnesota (National Alliance on Mental Illness) will help you learn about mental illnesses, the impact of negative attitudes and share 5 things each of us can do to make our communities a better place for people who experience a mental illness.
About NAMI NAMI Minnesota is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the lives of children and adults with mental illnesses and their families. Through education, support and advocacy we strive to eliminate the pervasive stigma of mental illnesses, affect positive changes in the mental health system, and increase the public and professional understanding of mental illnesses. Kay King is a Community Educator for NAMI Minnesota. For more information visit: https://namimn.org/
Speaker Bio Kay King is Older Adults Program Coordinator and Community Educator at NAMI Minnesota (the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Minnesota) and has worked for NAMI nine years. Kay teaches about 4,000 professionals, family members and people managing a mental illness per year in classes ranging from one to eight hours.
Kay is the former Executive Director of a retirement community in the Twin Cities that offers both independent and assisted living services. She managed a home health care agency. She also was a hotel and resort manager with over 25 years of hospitality industry experience nationally and internationally.
King is a family member whose grandmother, mother, sister and niece (fourgenerations) lived/lives with a mental illness.
Event Coordinators: Laurie Healy, Fueled Collective, Head of Sales Dustin Bruzenak, Modern Logic, CEO Aneela Idnani, HabitAware, CoFounder
Aneela Idnani is Cofounder & President of HabitAware (www.habitaware.com). HabitAware created it's Keen smart bracelet to help people “Retrain The Brain” from detrimental behaviors to positive ones. To do this, Keen creates awareness and mindfulness of hair pulling, skin picking and nail biting, which at their core are debilitating mental health conditions. Having grown up with hair pulling disorder, Aneela is now an outspoken mental health advocate, raising awareness of these very common yet unknown conditions. Aneela is a HAX hardware accelerator alumnus and her company recently received a research grant from the NIH to improve their device and validate Keen as a treatment for these disorders. Her life’s work (HabitAware) has been featured as a TIME Magazine 2018 Best Invention and in BuzzFeed, SELF Magazine, The Washington Post, Prevention Magazine and more.
follow: www.twitter.com/ak310i or www.twitter.com/habitaware
Passionate about making sure workplaces are healthy places. Jumped into the MSP tech startup scene in 2000 and was instantly hooked. A certified fitness instructor, introduced wellness classes into the startups I worked for to help employees+founders deal with the stress that comes with the territory. Since 2015, I’ve run marketing and sales at Fueled Collective (COCO), a destination for growing businesses and a place where entrepreneurs, freelancers and small businesses come together to explore, build and grow. Building a business and building a community have a lot in common. It’s important that a healthy and supportive ecosystem exists to address the physical, mental and emotional weight that all of us carry - whether we are a startup founder, a freelancer, a company employee or someone getting ready to head back into the workforce. It’s about taking care of business, and each other.
Dustin Bruzenak is CEO of Modern Logic, a digital product agency that helps businesses innovate and find success using modern marketing and technology strategy.
