Two years ago, a common interest in mental health advocacy landed two young college students from different ends of the country in the same virtual room. They didn’t know it yet, but their meeting would launch not just a friendship but a working partnership with national implications. 

Carson Domey, then a sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, and Shriya Garg, in her first year at the University of Georgia, started swapping strategies, sharing the trials and errors of their mental health advocacy work. Domey told Garg about his efforts as a teenager in Massachusetts to get schools to print the suicide prevention hotline on the back of student ID cards. Garg, intrigued, ran with the idea and found success with it on her own college campus.

Today, Domey and Garg are the leaders of the Coalition for Student Wellbeing, a nonprofit Domey founded in 2024 to unite college students across the country who want to affect mental health change at their institutions. The coalition’s first major campaign is to promote the inclusion of the now three-digit 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline on student IDs at as many colleges and universities as possible. 

Both Domey and Garg see the initiative as a relatively simple way to achieve critical, even life-saving, results. As Garg put it, “it’s just a small change that has a big, big impact.” 

18 to 25-year-olds report to suffer from mental illness more than any other adult demographic; yet they may be lacking a critical awareness of the resources that can help as well as the instinct to seek them out. 

In July 2022, 988 replaced a 10-digit number as the national hotline to call or text for support during a mental health or substance abuse-related crisis. But according to a 2023 study, nearly 57 percent of 1,345 college students surveyed didn’t know the 988 Lifeline existed; 20 percent said if they were in a crisis, they would not contact any services at all. 

A more recent poll found up to 82 percent of 18 to 24 year-olds had at least heard of 988, although only 28 percent of all respondents of any age indicated they were somewhat or very familiar with the service.

Adding 988 to college IDs places the tool literally in the palm of students’ hands. “You can't get anywhere without a student ID,” Garg said of the card’s constant companionship. “It's like your identity as a college student. You memorize your number — that's how you take your tests, that's how you get into all the buildings, that's how you get into your dorm, that's how you get into your dining halls.”

Perhaps even more than a resource, IDs that include 988 deliver a message to students: that their school and administration care about campus wellbeing and want to offer support. “It's nice to know from the get-go that there's someone or there's something there for you,” Garg said. That comfort, she added, is not only for young people but also their parents, eager for assurances their student will be okay on his own.

“It's nice to know from the get-go that there's someone or there's something there for you.”

The coalition’s campaign is not so much a new idea as it is a nudge towards one that has not yet reached its promise. Legislation in 25 states already mandates the inclusion of 988 on student IDs. To reach colleges and universities in the remaining 35, Domey and Garg have mapped a plan of attack, featuring their preferred three-pronged approach: education, advocacy, and collaboration, specifically across the student-administrator divide. 

So far, the coalition has partnered with the youth mental health nonprofit Active Minds to produce a toolkit for students interested in starting the campaign on their own campuses. They then followed up the release of the toolkit with a webinar to share additional information and field questions from students.

2026 is ushering in a new chapter of advocacy as the coalition launches an outreach campaign targeting the student governments at the five most populated colleges and universities in states where 988 is not yet required. The goal is to inspire existing student leaders to take up the initiative on their own campuses.

A particular benefit of the 988 appeal, especially as a starting point for the coalition, is that it requires a fairly low lift from the administrative point of view. Garg even called the effort “low hanging fruit.” 

“We're not asking the school to come up with a new resource. 988 is free; it's federally funded; it's there,” Domey said. “We have a very strong case for why this should cost zero dollars and zero cents for schools.”

Keeping the Connection 

The coalition’s leaders are hopeful that developing a broad network of student changemakers will pave the way for their future projects. “I think there's going to be so many long-lasting relationships with different campuses across the country that will be created from this initiative,” Domey said. “It really shows the value that we hope to demonstrate in terms of being a resource to student leaders.” 

As Domey and Garg well know, student mental health advocates need each other’s support; their battles are never easily won. Before Garg turned her attention to the 988 work, she was championing the implementation of student mental health screenings in universities. Though the cause itself is still alive, Garg’s progress stalled in the face of certain barriers, like privacy and liability concerns, too big to climb.

Domey is particularly familiar with the fits and starts of bureaucratic policy change, especially in large institutions where the coalition stands to have the deepest impact. “Even though we can have some of the most supportive administrators, faculty, and staff and students behind this,” he said, “things are still sometimes going to take time.” 

One asset in the coalition’s corner is the prominent advisory board of higher education leaders Domey has nurtured and engaged. Members include presidents Mark Gearan of Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Domenico Grasso of the University of Michigan.  

Kent Willis, another advisor, is the senior vice president for enrollment and student engagement at Stephen F. Austin State University. He said he’s been involved in the 988 campaign primarily to offer guidance on navigating diverse university systems and introduce Domey to personal connections on various campuses.

“Yes, all colleges and universities share some similarities, but the governance structure can be very different,” Willis said. He’s been counseling Domey, asking: “How is it that you create that common collaborative conversation for the initiative to get as far as it can in order to make the ultimate impact that we all hope that it would make?”

While ready to leverage his expertise and connection for the cause, Willis also stressed the importance that the messaging continues to come from students themselves. “It adds that other level of validity to the work,” he said, “because the student voice is extremely important and student leaders hold a significant role as a stakeholder group.”

Even if school leadership doesn’t ultimately institute the change to student IDs, Willis said the coalition’s campaign could be successful just by having reached the right ears in the right rooms. “It allows or invites a conversation that maybe hadn't been happening in the highest level decision-making conversations.”

For Domey, the ultimate driving force of the campaign continues to be the number of students it stands to help. In the master spreadsheet he created — with the hundreds of student government contacts the coalition hopes to reach — he also included a column for the total enrollment at each school. 

“As we hopefully start to see the spreadsheet light up green with schools that have changed,” Domey said, “we can tangibly see how many students we're impacting.”

You can reach the Coalition for Student Wellbeing at advocacy@c4sw.org for more information about the 988 campaign.

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.