Emotional Trauma, An App, A STEAM Competition, Serena & Venus Williams: Alex Perez ties it all together.
I want to center it around your experience with this competition, what it meant to be a leader. And then I also want to go into how this experience has impacted you and the decisions you're making in your life. So to start off, where are you right now? What part of the country are you serving in the army this summer? And where are you serving? And just tell us how you're feeling a little about your week, so we can just kind of drop into it
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 0:34
I want to also provide a link here to an article that Compton Unified published that gives you all the specifics of how this competition came to be and who was involved. And I'm doing this so that you can get a big picture view while you start learning about Alex's specific experience. And then from there, we'll bring in some new voices of people who were involved specifically in making this possible
Alex Perez
@AlexPerez · 3:24
Hey, Deborah, this is Alex, super excited about this interview. Pretty nervous, actually, but it's a good nervous. I hope my AirPods have a good enough microphone so it doesn't to sound super crappy. The AC is extremely loud. I am thankful I do have AC. The weather outside is horrible. It's like 80% humidity right now, and it's 75 degrees at 08:00 at night. That's insane. California
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 1:16
In fact, take us back to the name of the teacher who introduced this challenge. And why did he even pick it up and make it a project at your school? And why did you resonate with it and just help us understand? Because the average person, when they see an opportunity to create an app to help us deal with emotional trauma among teens like that sentence is not a usual sentence
Alex Perez
@AlexPerez · 4:17
He knew we were going to take the opportunity because just how we work together and what we thought about when we work together, it was always about helping people, even the five projects that we're working on now they're all about the people. Three of them are nonprofits, including move. Right. So that's when we heard about the challenge and that's how really everything got started, the team was already built
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 2:55
What your teacher, Mr. Mcleod, did is that they all were really interested. And also Serena and Venus Williams, who run this incredible youth center. They all got together and said, how do we make mental health a conversation that is alive and kicking in a community that really needs to have it. And I think putting it through a filter of an innovation challenge in the competition and making it something connected to tech was a really brilliant way to look into a conversation that otherwise might not happen
Alex Perez
@AlexPerez · 4:32
Hey, Deborah. So I did want to say that living in a poor community like Compton and being in the Army, I see two major mental health issues that are pretty much the same. And the biggest ones are probably the biggest ones that everybody deals with. And it's usually anxiety and depression. So I wouldn't say that. I myself had the skills to bring out important conversations, but I'm very good at building a team and creating ideas and executing ideas as a team
Alex Perez
@AlexPerez · 1:21
Because over time, we built a camaraderie, and we knew why each of us were there. We knew why we were here. We knew why we needed to get this done. We couldn't mess up. We couldn't fail. So we would hold each other accountable. We would say something like, hey, do this for your boy. Do this for your son. He's two months old. Think about your boy back home, push through. And it really built that camaraderie
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 2:13
But he brought that and pushed it forward to sort of inform his life and how he reached out to you guys and brought this challenge to the school so that you guys can bring mental health into your circle of communication. And it looks to me like you've taken all that and brought it to the army, which is so beautiful