The Elephant In The Room

Our goal is to make our school community and communities in Tipperary more aware of the mental health supports that are available and we want to share our community elephant in order to start positive conversations around mental health .

Our Social Issue

Our social issue wishes to address the issue that there is still a lot of stigma around the topic of Mental Health . Despite lots of improvements in recent years the statistics from Mental Health organisations are very worrying . We want to address this in our locality and hope that every school will be able to have an elephant of hope as a symbol of hope and to encourage conversations in schools , communities and boardrooms because Mental Health is everybody's business .

Why We Chose It

We chose this issue because we remain deeply concerned about the suicide figures in Ireland .We worked closely with Samaritans last year and realised the huge impact help agencies have .We wanted to help in some way . We decided that if we had a community elephant as a symbol of hope this would be very impactful in our local community as a symbol of hope. Our elephant would have a QR code on it so people could discreetly scan the code and have access to lots of mental help supports in Tipperary especially at the weekend.

Our Goal

Our goal is to make our school community and communities in Tipperary more aware of the mental health supports that are available and we want to share our community elephant in order to start positive conversations around mental health . We want everybody who sees our community elephant to be curious and ask the question Why Is There An Elephant In The Room? and start positive conversations. We want to do our part in helping reduce stigma and shame that still can exist around mental health issues . Our ultimate goal is to save lives through awareness of supports .

Our Innovative Action

This year we have worked tirelessly with local businesses as our elephant was their guest for two weeks at a time every business that has hosted our elephant of hope has made a big difference by starting real conversations around mental health and the supports available locally . We created school assemblies for World Mental Day , International Men's Day , we will gift Rocky to the Tipperary Pieta House Committee in May , and currently we are working with local guards to create awareness. Fundraised for local mental health charity . Making a step by step school booklet

Our Impact

We believe we have made a huge positive different because our elephant of Hope has visited so many businesses and the feedback has been so positive . We have helped start conversations around mental health as our elephant is so big and colourful he is hard to miss and people are curious as to why there is an elephant sculpture in their local business . We will never know how many people we have helped but for every person who scans the support QR code we believe we are helping in eradicating the suicide figures by stamping out stigma