Using a Mentoring Afterschool Program to Improve Adolescent Mental Health and Physical Activity: A Pilot Study

Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic many youth are experiencing declines in physical activity and worsening mental health (e.g., depression symptoms). These declines are exacerbated among underserved youth who experience greater barriers to health services and exposure to life stressors that put them at increased risk for impaired mental, emotional, and behavioral health. School-based afterschool programming is an important strategy to reach this population of youth and provides intervention at a time when youth are likely to otherwise be in environments not supportive of health. Further participation in extracurricular activities has been shown to be a protective factor for youth mental health. However, consistent with the Behavioral Theory of Depression, youth who are currently inactive and who have depression symptoms are unlikely to participate in afterschool programming on their own and likely require heightened positive reinforcement when they do attend to encourage retention. Given the high prevalence of youth who experience symptoms of depression and resource and staffing challenges faced by many schools, the level of support needed to engage students to consistently participate and benefit from afterschool programming is often beyond the capacity of school-based afterschool programs. In partnership with a local afterschool program for middle school students in a low resource community, the investigators developed an augmented version of the current afterschool program in which college students are trained to mentor and assist in the afterschool program, expanding the capacity of the afterschool program to engage students. The mentoring intervention uses behavioral activation principles to help youth connect their behaviors with their mood and support youth to engage in behaviors that improve their mood, including physical activity. The main purpose of this study is to pilot the feasibility of the newly developed intervention.