Breaking the stigma: Trulaske student raises awareness of mental health among Black students

By Stephen Schmidt

It took Alaina Meekins-Kent years to get where she is today — a place of sharing, a place of knowledge.

Through the efforts of a recent birthday fundraiser this past fall, she hoped to raise the collective consciousness — in addition to money — of her fellow Black students at the University of Missouri regarding mental health.

"I felt like I was finally having a breakthrough with my mental health, at least to a point where I could actually feel comfortable telling people about it,” said the Trulaske College of Business senior from Kansas City, Missouri.

She initially established a partnership with The Heriford House Counseling Center. Established in June 2019, the Columbia-based center specializes in providing affordable mental health services through mental health providers who have been trained to be “culturally aware and competent to work with the diverse individuals and families in our community,” according to its website. The center currently serves more than 320 clients from a wide range of backgrounds.

“Alaina has a lot of passion and drive to be able to help others like she has during a difficult time in her life,” said Melissa Williams, the center’s owner and one of its 16 providers. “Her fundraiser strongly aligned with our mission at The Heriford House. We strive to provide accessible mental health services to the community — especially the marginalized community.”

After reaching an agreement with Williams, Meekins-Kent sought to raise $2,500 that would pay for up to six sessions of counseling services for up to 60 students at Mizzou who identify as Black. She would do so from the time range of her 23rd birthday on Oct. 20 to Nov. 18.

When all was said and done, she had raised a total of $3,166.

In conjunction with the fundraiser, Meekins-Kent set up an event at MU’s Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center on Oct. 28 by the name of “More Than a Moment.” The event had a panel composed of four Black students who shared their collective mental health experiences. It also featured a presentation from one of the providers from The Heriford House, Renee Scott-Powers.

“I decided I really just wanted to make sure that people understood how mental health can really affect every aspect of their life,” Meekins-Kent said. “I've witnessed a lot of my friends dealing with anxiety and depression, but not know what they were dealing with because those topics are not talked about enough within the Black community. We don't want to deal with them.”

“I wanted to make sure I was educating people along the way because not everyone wants to sign up for therapy, but I wanted to figure out a way to help them.”

Meekins-Kent, who will graduate this summer, has plans to one day take the model that she constructed for the fundraiser and expand the scope by making it a nonprofit organization that would cover mental health expenses for Black college students on a national scale.

She first started working on the details for such aspirations in the summer of 2021 as a student in the Principles of Entrepreneurship class, taught by Annette Kendall, business engagement analyst for innovation, entrepreneurship, and commercialization at MU’s Office of Research and Economic Development.

“My first impression was that she was a student with an internal value system that not only motivated and drove her to produce good work, but also to do good in the community,” said Kendall, who is a former assistant teaching professor at Trulaske. “In every class, she would provide so much value to her fellow aspiring entrepreneurs, providing suggestions of people and resources they could connect with to develop their own ideas. Alaina’s energy seemed boundless.”

Help in a time of need

The motivation for the fundraiser stems from the first Homecoming that Meekins-Kent experienced as a Mizzou student, which was memorable for much more than being her 19th birthday.

As a freshman, she was walking through Tiger Plaza on a sun-splashed 72-degree fall afternoon on Oct. 20, 2017.

Meekins-Kent had thought it was strange that her mother, Andrea Kent, had never called to wish her a happy birthday, but had gone about her day and the preparations for the weekend when a phone call came from a family member that would turn her world upside down. She found out that her mother was in a coma at a hospital in Kansas City.

“She told me to rush home immediately,” she said. “It's 5 p.m. on a Friday, and I didn't have a car.”

What she did have was the contact information for Jeffrey Wiese, BA ’98, EdHD ’15, who at the time served as an assistant dean at Trulaske and led the freshman interest group to which she belonged. Wiese had provided his cell number, just in case the students needed anything.

“I took his number down, never thinking I was going to use it,” Meekins-Kent said.

Despite having a “breakdown” moment on Tiger Plaza, Meekins-Kent found enough composure to call him, thinking that he may not answer — or have more pressing matters.

“I told him the situation and he dropped everything to hurry up and try to get me home,” she said.

Meekins-Kent ran back to her dorm room, packed what she could and then waited for Wiese to pick her up and drop her off at the nearby bus station.

When she arrived in Kansas City, she discovered that her mother had fallen victim to an undetected brain tumor. She remained in a coma, completely unresponsive.

Meekins-Kent went in and out of the hospital to see her mom and be with her family — all while still trying to continue her studies at Mizzou. Her brother drove her to Columbia from Kansas City so that she could attend classes and take exams. Eventually, Meekins-Kent agreed with the doctors’ decision to take her mother off of life support, once it was determined that she had no brain function, after previously losing her ability to speak. Her mother passed away on November 18, 2017.

"It was clearly obvious that nothing else could be done,” Meekins-Kent said. “That whole time literally changed the rest of my life…. A lot of time in between then and now is a blur, but from the times I do remember I know that my mental health just left me."

‘None of this had a name’

Meekins-Kent was going to therapy a few weeks before that fateful phone call on her 19th birthday as a way of dealing with bouts of depression and anxiety — although she did not tell anyone that she was going until over a year had passed.

“None of this had a name. I wasn’t educated on this,” she said, “When I was having the symptoms, I didn't know what was going on, but I knew if I didn't hurry up and go seek therapy, I really didn't know what was going to happen to me.”

Meekins-Kent eventually stopped going to therapy, leading to her sophomore and junior years being the toughest on her mental health.

In 2020, though, she went back to therapy, allowing her the strength to proceed with an initial fundraiser that centered around her 22nd birthday, during which she set out to raise $1,000 for Sheffield Place, a nonprofit domestic shelter for women and children in Kansas City — and an establishment that was near and dear her mother’s heart.

She ended up raising $1,400 between the dates of Oct. 20 and Nov. 18 that year, after creating a video that explained the cause and the significance of those two dates.

"I wasn't fully ready to tell my story but I decided to just kind of go out on a limb,” she said.

Meekins-Kent encourages everyone in the Mizzou community, regardless of background or ethnicity, to simply “keep trying” when it comes to maintaining their mental health.

“That’s such a basic thing to say, but mental health can break you down to the point where you want to give up,” Meekins-Kent said.

“But you just have to keep trying. And when you're ready, tell your story because you never know who your story can help. You never know who needs to hear it at that time."