Mental H2O started with a 16-year-old who refused to wait for an adult

Idania Rodriguez has a simple standard for what her nonprofit publishes: “One hundred percent of it is researched.”

Rodriguez founded Mental H2O Inc. in November 2021, with a friend, while a student at Jule F. Sumner High School in Riverview, Florida. The Osprey Observer, a local student-run paper, profiled her at 16. She said that if no other adult would take a stand on student mental health, she would.

The organization is a registered 501(c)(3) with a stated mission to “educate and inform our local youth community of healthy ways to cope with mental distress.” In practice that means a website of free articles, guides and videos on stress, depression and anxiety, along with helplines such as the Tampa Bay Crisis Center, plus posters and infographics for schools. The quality bar is the interesting part. “We never put anything out there without confirmation that it works,” Rodriguez told the Osprey Observer.

The second half of the model is labor. Mental H2O offers remote internships, in areas like graphic design, to Hillsborough County students, with community service hours attached. By the time of the 2022 profile, Rodriguez had approved more than 200 internship hours. It is a tidy loop: teens build the resources that other teens read.

The group has kept going. Its site now lists a Global Mental Health Ambassador Program that funds a diploma course for interns, a community directory of support organizations, and free resource distribution to schools, clinics and youth organizations. It also lists grants including $6,300 from 100 Who Care Valencia Lakes and $1,000 from the Starbucks Foundation. The site’s own impact counters are unfilled placeholders, so we are not repeating them.

Rodriguez has also co-written a guide to entrepreneurship for students in grades 6 through 12, which is a sign she sees nonprofit-building as a learnable skill. Given the way she has run this one, she is right.