Elif Kaya is your typical St. Mike’s student: a third-year Pearson Scholar who specializes in psychology, she is also a start-up founder whose mental health platform One Smile Effect has reached teens in 60+ countries.
Oh, and in addition to Forbes calling her a Teen Titan, she’s given TEDx talks, started a podcast, won multiple community service awards, and done dozens of media interviews talking about her work.
In short, she’s a dynamo who is actively making the world a better place.
And this year, she’s the head of SMC Pride, a student-led club that fosters a sense of belonging for LGBTQIA2S+ students and their allies at St. Michael’s College.
‘It’s not really like me to be out there in front of people’
Kaya started One Smile Effect in Turkey during the COVID-19 pandemic when she was 15. She worked with 100 people, mostly high school and college students, to foster a sense of togetherness during the pandemic. They offered peer-led mental health programming through school clubs, where 3000 people met bi-weekly to take part in online support groups and online events with therapists, teaching young people how to take care of their mental health.
It was the first time she’d ever been in a leadership role. It wasn’t an easy path adjusting to being that position; it took a while to get over her own fears and social anxieties.
“I would say I’m very introverted. It’s not really like me to be out there in front of people. But I definitely learned a lot about myself and grew a lot as a person. I got over my fear of talking with people. It helped me on that personal level of overcoming social anxiety.”
Apart from that, meeting people from all over the world and getting their ideas on this initiative was helpful, “because I also learned about how Mental Health is viewed in different countries. For example, in Turkey, it’s very stigmatized, but in the US or Canada, the conversation is normal.”
‘A growing awareness of the importance of community and social connection’
Even though the organization Kaya founded grew out of social media, she’s aware of the limitations of online social relationships.
“You can meet people online, you can create some sort of social action. But it can be addictive. I feel like it’s a double-edged sword. It can take away from the time and energy that you would otherwise spend on being in the moment in real life, connecting with people.”
In the last year, partly as a reaction to the growth of AI, Kaya has seen a trend of young people going offline and wanting to meet people in real life.
“Maybe everyone is just tired and overwhelmed, and they don’t really find that social media meets their needs,” she says. “Obviously, connecting with someone on social media is not the same as meeting them in person. That in-person presence offers something different to our nervous systems than texting does.”
It’s hard, she says, with schoolwork and other responsibilities, but she sees people searching for ways to connect with one another in-person.
“There’s definitely a growing awareness of the importance of community and social connection.”
‘I was really scared of not finding my community’
And that’s why the SMC Pride Club is so important. It brings people into a real-life social network.
When Kaya first started at St. Mike’s, she was nervous as a queer newcomer to Canada. “I was really scared of not finding my community, but I feel there’s so many different clubs for different interests on campus, I was very surprised by that in my first year,” she says.
Then she met with the director of Pride SMC. “We chatted and he said, I’m graduating next year and if you’d like to take over, I trust you with it. And that’s how I took over.”
Kaya took over as head of SMC Pride position last winter. They held study groups during finals and connected with other similar groups at U of T, taking part in a queer prom at Trinity College.
This coming year, she has big plans. She’s planning a monthly lived experience circle program, where people can talk about different aspects of being part of the LGBTQIA2S+ community. She also wants to dial into the SMC Student Union (SMCSU) and other programs and clubs on campus.
“I want to get the word out more, because some queer friends I know here, they didn’t know about Pride SMC, and I was pretty surprised by that.”
She hopes to get her club’s programming integrated into SMCSU’s official programming, and to connect more with other student clubs, so that there is more institutional support for LGBTQIA2S+ students.
“Maybe next year will be a pilot program. We would get feedback and then present it at the end of the year to SMCSU,” she adds.
‘Social connection is a huge protective factor against mental health issues’
Last year, Kaya was a research assistant at INQYR Lab , a SSHRC-funded interdisciplinary and multilingual international research partnership designed to understand and support the resilience of LGBTQIA2S+ youth through technology-engaged research. At INQYR, she supported studies on queer youth’s relationship with technology and well-being using qualitative data cleaning and coding.
“It’s really up my alley because I’m interested in how technology is shaping our emotional and social lives with a particular focus on a population that I’m pretty involved in.”
That experience really helped focus her thinking on LGBTQIA2S+ students’ wellbeing – and, while there are many ways to improve mental health, she believes social connections are key.
“Social connection is a huge protective factor against mental health. Just feeling like you belong to a community, have people around you that are supportive, that see you for who you are and accept you for who you are. That’s pretty important.”