What is NoSo?

NoSo’s role is to relieve teens of the various issues they face in the digital world by empowering our participants to foster a healthy tech/life balance. We do so through our month-long movement, educational program, mindfulness toolkits and events, and teen empowerment opportunities.

Our ‘No Social Media November’ movement challenges teen groups and families across the US to modify the way they interact with social media during a 1-month period. We give teens 3 flexible ways of participating: fully deleting, partially deleting, or using digital wellness tips to make their phone less addictive. Our participants collectively aim to re-enter the digital realm equipped with deeper awareness of their relationship with tech, personalized tools and coping mechanisms, and deepened relationships.

Additionally, our research-backed school program is designed to improve mental health and foster a healthier tech/life balance overall by guiding students through a similar month-long challenge helping students build a foundation of education through our workshops and presentations, self-awareness through mindfulness activities, and building offline community through teen-led events.

We partner with K-12 schools, teen groups, and universities to engaging in public speaking opportunities to promote digital wellness and lead teens through our impactful programming.

The Story. How NoSo Was Born:

Immense Loss

My 4 years of high school experience were not like the usual; they were plagued with death (primarily suicide).`5 close friends and about 7 other mutual friends died throughout my teen years, and it hit really hard and furthered my depression immensely. I didn’t know what to do anymore, so I knew I had to take action.
After the 10th death, I made a petition.

Our community was struggling and I wanted to see my old high school district doing more to prevent this from happening again. I wrote this petition with the goal to make change in our community so no one else would have to go through such immense loss at such a young age. Within days I got almost 14,000 signatures.
Suicide prevention in schools

I quickly began working with my old district to implement more mental health resources to make it the priority at the high schools. This included focusing on ways we could inject empathy, suicide pre-inter-&post-vention, kindness, therapy resources, designated mental health rooms, curriculum changes, and different protocols into the system that weren’t previously there. I even got to paint a mural (shown above) to represent this whole story.
The Social Dilemma.

In late October, I watched TSD, the Netflix Doc that highlights the problems that social media inflicts on our society, and it made me feel so many emotions (if you haven’t yet seen it, I highly recommend doing so). It hit me hard and I wanted be a part of the solution, and thus NoSo November was created, sprouting randomly out of my mind. I proposed it to the mental health workers I’d been working with in the district and we decided we would test run it at a high school. I had no idea it was going to get this big.
Pitched NoSo to LookUp Live.

I signed up for The Social Dilemma’s newsletter and saw this opportunity for young entrepreneurs with tech solutions to have the chance to win a grant from LookUp to push their projects miles ahead, which I applied for, and somehow ended up winning alongside 11 other great teams. With their help, this project has turned into something bigger than myself, which I am so grateful for.
Here we are!

After all that, I am now here, endlessly grateful that my message to prioritize mental health and educate teens on the negative effects of social media is now being discussed in a school setting, and is impacting real lives. As they say, there is always a silver lining to any situation, and these tragic deaths that still impact me everyday have created something beautiful, that is saving lives every day. This is all for them.