Youth living on tribal reservations experience behavioral health disparities at some of the highest rates in the United States due to disparities, including lack of community-based preventative measures, stigmas surrounding mental illness and accessing behavioral health care, and lack of perceived need for behavioral health care. This planning grant seeks to investigate the feasibility of a sociotechnical, community-based behavioral health intervention that integrates, for example, tribal community values, mobile health, and educational gaming. The research will be carried out in partnership with the Hopi Opportunity Youth Initiative (HOYI), an organization that seeks to address the social and emotional needs of youth living on the Hopi Reservation through service learning, mentorship, and community curriculum.

Integrating expertise from computer science, psychology, education, and applied Indigenous studies, this interdisciplinary approach aims to be impactful for many tribal and remote communities that struggle with access to behavioral health care services by making behavioral health education more palatable to youth and accessible to communities that lack robust telecommunications infrastructure. The research activities seek to: (i) identify the behavioral health concerns of the Hopi community; (ii) ideate the design of a SUNRISE (Sustainable Resilience for Social and Emotional Health) app; and (iii) characterize the telecommunications infrastructure available to the community. The study leverages and combines several approaches that have been demonstrated to successfully bolster behavioral well-being in American Indian/Alaskan Native youth populations. Strengthening social and emotional resiliency skills in tribal communities is a critical first step in addressing other pernicious economic, educational, and physical health inequities experienced by these communities.