Interview with Pam Schuller, Executive Director of Here.Now

Q: What is your background, and how did you get involved in Here.Now?

A: I am the Program Manager for Here.Now. I am also an inclusion advocate and a stand-up comic. As a kid I had Tourette Syndrome and OCD and was depressed for many years. I turned to comedy as a way to cope and have now incorporated that into my work at Here.Now. The focus is on resilience through creativity. 

Q: What’s Here.Now, and how did it get started?

A: Here.Now. is a teen-driven Jewish movement to provide support, build connections, increase wellbeing and resilience, and reduce stigma around mental health. 

We received an initial grant through UJA to create this online platform and website for teens and mental health. I knew from my days as a Youth Engagement Director, that if you create something for teens and be like “here, we made it for you,” none of them are going to want to use it. 

So, I thought, let’s take a step back, let’s do something that’s cool and out of box that no one else is doing. So literally, everything was made by teens, for teens – even the title of the organization Here.Now.   

I visit summer camps, Jewish day schools, synagogues, nifty, BBYO, USY, and all those places and teens named it. It is named after this idea that everyone is asking teens “What do you want to be when you grow up,” as opposed to, “Who are you right now? What matters right now?” You are here now, and you matter now. So here now. 

Q: How does a teen get involved in Here.Now?

A: Everything we do is guided by teens. We have tons of entry points of ways to be involved. Everything from a social media street team where teens just commit to liking and sharing our content and then we send you Here.Now swag in the mail, so you can rep it. 

We have articles like “how to get help,” “where to get help,” “how to know if you need help,” which are done by professionals and vetted by teens and then we have teen-created articles on failure, body image, and learning to love your differences. We had a teen who published his college rejection letters; that went semi viral.

Our leadership board is made up of 16 teens who have specific roles. We have one teen who manages our Instagram, we have one who works with me to make programs for when we go into synagogues and camps, so everything is team guided, but we also have thousands of teens who just follow us on social media, like/share content, read our content, or just know about us from a presentation. The third piece happened organically. I realized really quickly that once we launched, teens were reaching out and saying things like, “I am in therapy and I want to work or go to a summer camp, what camps do you know that will allow me to continue with this?” So, we just started keeping track of everything going on so I could connect or refer. 

Q: You mentioned you were creating an app. What might the app feature?

A: The goal of the app is to create a Jewish teen mental health community feel. It will have things like all of the articles that teens have written, the professional articles, and post a question where we will have a board of teens and a board of professionals who can answer it or the ability to post videos like “here are 5 ways to do self-care before finals,” so things like that. I think what sets us apart is that people keep asking how is Here.Now successful, and it is just because I listen to teens! It’s not that hard to say what’s going on?, what do we need?, and then let me figure out the fun thing and we will make it happen. It is a cool program. 

Q: How do you incorporate comedy into your events? 

A: At our big kick off event, we paired teens with professional stand-up comedians from Comedy Central and MTV to write jokes about loving their differences and then we sold out Caroline’s Comedy Club. We had over 300 teens, parents, officials, and clergy. We did an animated film on body image geared for little kids. We do work on labels and resilience and we had a giant failure graduation ceremony. Taking these topics that are really about destigmatizing and giving every teen the vocabulary to talk about this because we don’t all have mental health challenges now, but at some point, we might, and if we are giving everyone with tools in their toolbox to ask for help, then studies show it is going to be safer and healthier for everyone.