Active Minds
mental health awareness charity
Active Minds is an American nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting mental health, especially among young adults, via peer-to-peer dialogue and interaction. Active Minds was founded by Alison Malmon in 2003, after her older brother died by suicide in 2000.
Active Minds has over 600 chapters and offers programs focused on mental health awareness and education. These include Send Silence Packing, a traveling suicide prevention exhibit; Active Minds Speakers, a group of presenters who provide mental health education; the Healthy Campus Award, which recognizes colleges prioritizing student well-being; and Active Minds @Work, which works to build a mental health culture in the workplace.
History
Alison Malmon launched the first student-led chapter of what would become Active Minds in her junior year at the University of Pennsylvania, after the death of her brother. Brian Malmon was a student at Columbia University where he was a member of the Dean's list, and was a leader in many extracurricular activities. However, he was suffering from what was later diagnosed as schizoaffective disorder. After his death, many friends claimed that they had noticed changes in Brian, but were not sure what to say or how to approach the situation, and therefore did nothing. This silence and lack of awareness is what prompted Malmon to start Active Minds.
The organization, originally called "Open Minds", was dedicated to increasing awareness about mental illness.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4677519. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2003 and 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Active Minds” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.