Senior Phebe Cox is usually reserved in tone, but when she begins talking about her frustration with not being able to do anything to change the perception of mental health at Gunn, her voice picks up urgency and pace. “I felt like I saw so much stuff going down at our school and I felt so out of control,” she said. “I needed to feel like I was doing something or I was working for something that would change lives.”

For the past two years, Cox has been turning her frustration into advocacy through the Allcove and Bring Change to Mind organizations, both causes furthering mental health awareness and support in the community.

Allcove, a Stanford initiative headed by Cox’s youth advisory group, works to provide mental health resources for teens by establishing a network of community centers across the United States (U.S.). “There’s a program called Headspace in Australia, and it provides free mental health care for youth ages 12 to 25,” she said. “Stanford decided that they wanted to start one in the U.S. I’ve gotten to be a part of the process of starting that. So we have Allcove now.”

Indeed, Cox has been a part of Allcove since the organization was founded. “Initially it was very baseline—we had to figure out a name and get all the legal logistics out of the way,” she said.

Since then, the organization has come a long way. “A year ago, one of my friends from the Youth Advisory Group did a testimony and we all wrote testimonies to get $19 million from Santa Clara County,” Cox said. “Two months ago, I got to go to the state capital and give a testimony on how I’ve dealt with mental health and why it’s important that the government recognizes the fact that we need funding for mental and physical health care for youth.”