In this video episode of Thriving Together, hosts Maya Smith and Jason Lehmbeck speak with Maria Barrera, Co-Founder and CEO of Clayful and an alumna of the Thrive Center’s Innovation Hub fellowship. Clayful partners with schools, its financial and distribution partners, to give students across the country on-demand coaching by text.
Young people hear the statistics about a youth mental health crisis and conclude that other people need the help more than they do. So they wait, the problem grows, and by the time they reach out, it’s become severe.
Clayful launches to every student in a school, not only the ones already flagged, and it sets the threshold for a conversation as low as it will go. A crush counts. A new anime show counts. One student opened a chat unsure his problem was “a big enough deal.” His dog had died. “That moment of connection is actually healing, too,” Maria says.
When the threshold is that low, students that the system rarely sees show up. Maria shares that 46% of chats come from boys, and about 80% of students who identified with higher levels of anxiety on the PHQ-4 were using Clayful. The moment school partners became believers, she says, came when Clayful flagged a student who was thinking about ending their life and had never been on their radar.
The conversation also gets practical about why this works as a business. Schools are the front door to mental health, Maria says: students trust them, they are already there, and there are no transportation barriers. Because Clayful collected clinical measures from day one, prevention becomes something you can see. “You can’t retroactively create data, but if you have it, then you can retroactively analyze it and see things in the data that are pretty magical.” By her account, 90% of students who started the year low-need stayed there, twice the rate of students who did not use Clayful. And with grant funding sunsetting, Clayful is pairing school partnerships with insurance reimbursement so the support outlasts any single grant.
For questions, comments, or ideas for future episodes, please email us at: thrivecenter@georgetown.edu .
Interview Excerpt
Jason: If we rewind time and go back to those moments when you had this inspiration to start Clayful, you had this insight around meeting young people where they’re at and using text as a connection to delivering on your why. What brought you to that idea?
Maria: Definitely listening to young people themselves. A lot of the conversations center around: “If I go to talk to a counselor, if I go to talk to a therapist, they don’t always get me. They don’t always reflect culturally who I am or my day-to-day.” And it turns out that my generation can get whatever food I want, pick my favorite show, play my favorite game, I can do everything at the touch of a button. But if I want to get help on something that’s really bothering me, I have to wait till that next appointment on Tuesday at 5:00 PM to talk through that.
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