Behind Robbie’s Hope

Robbie’s Hope gained national recognition this year with an appearance on the CBS Morning show. Kari Eckert and Sloane Simon, winner of the 2021 Hall of Personal Expression contest, sat down with Gayle King to talk about the progress being made to reduce teen suicide rates across the United States, and the work left to be done. In the week following the segment we sent out over 50,000 Adult Handbooks to people across the country.

In 2019, Jason Eckert and Board Member Scott Coe, vision boarded a future where our artwork from the Hall of Personal Expression would be featured in a museum gallery exhibition. That dream was fulfilled with our first exhibition, “Through Their Eyes”, which ran for two months at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Featuring the works from over 40 teen artists, it was an emotional journey experienced through their stories and art.

We hit a major milestone in Colorado in 2025 when teen suicide rates dropped to their lowest rate since 2007! A staggering reduction over the past seven years from a collaborative effort from multiple organizations, agencies, and advocates in the state. We are proud to be part of that journey. We still have a long way to go as we work to mimic those results in the other 49 states in the US.

Our latest edition in our handbook series was published. The Athlete’s Handbook was written for coaches, parents, and teen athletes on how to have conversations about performance, desire, eating disorders, and the pressures of planning for a future in college sport.

Our HOPEgroups continue to expand nationally with school clubs organizing in over a dozen states and multiple high schools. These clubs represent a transformative way for teens to gather with a common purpose, allowing them to raise awareness about teen mental health in their schools. Run by teens, supported by the Robbie’s Hope parent organization with resources, coaching, and mentoring.

It’s been five years since we lost Robbie to suicide and we first met with over 200 teens in Golden, CO. Teen across the United States are in a mental health crisis, with record high levels of suicide, clinical depression and anxiety. Fueled by a non-stop negative news cycle that is driven by social and conventional media, our teens struggle to find hope in this world.

Our teen interns, 21 of them since we started, are the lifeblood of Robbie’s Hope. We are a teen led organization and our Interns develop and manage all our programming. By the numbers after 5 years: 400,000 handbooks distributed, 550,000 rubber wristbands given to teens and adults reminding them that It’s Ok to Not Be Ok, 4,215 Ambassadors from 50 states and 7 countries.

Through our continued partnership with Children’s Hospital Colorado and other partner organizations we have transformed the Colorado landscape for teen mental health. In 2023 we successfully lobbied for free therapy for teens in crisis, 988 as a national crisis hotline number, and mental health resources being printed on the back of all student IDs for grades 8 to 12 and in Colorado public colleges and universities.

Kari Eckert has become a frequent guest on panels and in speaking engagements as an expert in teen mental health and teen suicide prevention. She was able to participate in a panel with the Surgeon General, which ultimately led to a visit by First Lady Jill Biden to the Robbie’s Hope Club in Westfield, Indiana. Our teens participated in an open conversation with the First Lady and Surgeon General on the struggles and pressures that they face.

What we are doing is working! While suicide rates have continued to soar across the country, we saw the rates in Jefferson County, Colorado, were we started, to be cut in half from 2018 to 2022. Our Board of Directors laid out an aggressive plan to model the HOPEgroup program that has been so successful in our backyard, across the country. Our first “out of state” HOPEgroup was formed by three amazing young women in Westfield, Indiana.

In 2022 we started a podcast, HOPEfull Conversations, featuring Kari Eckert as a host with a wide range of guests. New episodes air weekly and focus on a diverse of views and perspectives from teens, adult activists, and mental health professionals. Our podcast is produced by teen interns who are responsible for identifying, scheduling, and preparing background materials for our future guests.

Our Ambassador program has grown to over 4,000 teens from across all 50 states. On our website we talk about creating a youth-led movement, an army of teens, that will change the future. This is our army, a highly diverse and passionate group of teens that is focused on changing the future, so their friends stop dying by suicide.

Robbie’s Hope Records was formed with a singular purpose, to support our teen’s expression through music and film. Winners of the music category in the annual Hall of Personal Expression contest are flown to Denver for a studio session at The Keep Recording, one of the preeminent recording studios in the Mountain West.

Our partnership with The Keep Recording goes back to almost day one, when we recorded the songs that were sung at Robbie’s funeral. Since then, we have brought a diverse group of teens into the studio, where they can record their music and benefit from training, coaching, and mentoring from music professionals. The artists own their masters and all publishing rights to their music.

The HOPEfull Drive continues to grow across the country as a transformation event of focused youth-led advocacy. Thousands of teens hit the streets, social media, and the airwaves in a public awareness campaign. Their impact has become sizable with an estimated 3 million people reached via Television, Radio and Print, 250,000 Adult Handbooks distributed over a three-week period, and countless teen to adult conversations about mental health.

We published our second handbook focused on helping adults navigate a conversation with teens about technology and device use. The Technology handbook is available in English and Spanish and tackles a diverse set of topics from social media to gaming.

COVID struck the world and overnight ended our in-person outreach activities and bi-weekly HOPEgroup meetings. We were forced to think differently, and have embraced new technologies like live-streaming, and zoom. Our new Ambassador program has become our focal point for enabling teens across the US. In less than two months we had enrolled over 2,000 youth from all 50 states into the program. Weekly group zoom calls and a myriad of daily conversations via zoom, text, chat, and IM have enabled a passionate and diverse group of teens who are hyper focused on changing the future so that their friends stop dying.

Our teens wrote and published a handbook, for adults, on how to have difficult conversations about mental health and suicide. The Adult Handbook has impacted thousands of families across the US. We ship individual copies, and in bulk, free of charge. In 2020 we shipped over 100,000 hard copies and had an additional 30,000 electronic downloads from our website.

Our teens are passionate about destigmatizing mental health, and one of the easiest, most impactful ways to do that is to allow mental health, along with physical health, to be a reason for an excused absence in school. Prior to their bill becoming law, if a child was having an anxiety attack or depressive episode, a parent in Colorado would have to call their school and lie, making up a story about a physical ailment. That has all changed in Colorado, and our Ambassadors are driving similar legislation forward in 15 states.

Teen led, adult sponsored youth groups were formed to begin working to end the stigmas surrounding teen mental health in their communities. Our teen activists are the lifeblood of Robbie’s Hope. Robbie’s Hope is giving them a voice and a platform to make a change.

Meeting every other week, the HOPEgroups are designed to bring youth together in a safe space where they can share their struggles with each other, and work on projects designed to bring awareness to their schools and communities.

The HOPEfull Drive was created as an activist campaign to increase awareness about teen mental health in Colorado. For three weeks, beginning on Robbie’s birthday on January 21st, teens hit the streets of Denver to talk about mental health and spread a message of hope. Their impact was nothing short of amazing with an estimated 3,000 1:1 conversations with adults, over 1,000,000 households reached via TV, Radio, and Print, and over $25,000 raised to benefit Robbie’s Hope programs.

Not all teens are comfortable advocating in their communities. We are passionate about meeting teens in the spaces that they are most comfortable in. For some, that is through the arts.

Joy, Sorrow, Anxiety, Elation, Depression. The Hall of Personal Expression gives teens both venue and voice for their artistic self-expression around the many emotions our youth face today.

Our juried competition invites entries from teens encompassing film, music, fine arts, digital arts, photography, and poetry. Winning entries are being curated for an eventual traveling exposition showcasing teen mental health.

In partnership with Children’s Hospital Colorado, we successfully lobbied for the passage of Colorado SB195 which provides for streamlined mental health care and mental health pre-screening in primary care physician’s offices. A critical first step to eliminate the stigma surrounding youth mental health.

After the death of their son Robbie on October 11, 2018, Jason & Kari Eckert hosted an open meeting to listen to the people most affected by suicide in their small community, the teens themselves. Over 200 teens from 11 high schools across Jefferson County, Colorado gather for the first time. Over the course of that evening, we grieved together and Jason & Kari learned about the epidemic of teen suicide that was sweeping across Colorado.

The teens wanted to see change. To destigmatize conversations about depression, anxiety and suicide. As one teen stated: “to stop their friends from dying”.

Robbie’s Hope was formed on that evening, October 22, 2018.