Psyche won Community Engagement Award

With great honour and pride, we announce that the “2020 - Mental Matters Podcast Series” has been awarded the “2021 Campus Community Project Radio Award”!

 

The advent of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic last year threw us all a massive curveball, and the Psyche 2020 Team* was not exempt from the heartache, anxiety and disappointment it brought with it. Amid all the uncertainty and frustration, however, we saw an opportunity to further engage with the community at large to decrease the stigma surrounding mental health and advocate for better mental health awareness in the student body.

 

Given the developments that COVID-19 and lockdown restrictions had brought, new opportunities had to been explored as a way to reach this mandate. So we rallied together and began working on virtual ways we could reach people. One of the exciting initiatives that came from this was collaborating with TUKS FM to produce a 10-week podcast series that addressed various mental health-related themes. Each episode consisted of a guest speaker invited to a virtual interview with Kopano Bookholane (TUKS FM radio host) and Kimberly Eardley (Psyche 2020 Chairperson) to discuss a topic voted for by the student body. In addition, the students submitted their questions, and guest speakers weighed in with their expertise while we all grappled with what mental health meant to us during this unprecedented time.

 

Therefore, this award is the culmination of not just the Psyche 2020 Team and TUKS FM’s efforts, but also the heartfelt dedication and commitment to the mental well-being of the entire University of Pretoria community. We would like to thank the guest speakers, who graciously offered their time and wisdom to the student body, who voted on topics and later provided feedback on each episode. To all the staff members from various departments who worked behind the scenes to make this happen and helped us reach wider communities, none of this would have been possible without you. Now more than ever, as we celebrate this outstanding achievement, we also acknowledge that issues around mental health are so pertinent that community projects such as these have been recognized as meeting a need on a community and universal level. We hope, therefore, that the great work that has begun here will continue far beyond this project and award. Thank you again to everyone who was a part of this initiative; massive congratulations to the Psyche and TUKS FM team. We look forward to many more of these exciting and worthy initiatives.

 

Click here if you missed this podcast series, want to listen to another episode again or would like to contact the Psyche Society, and click here for the full podcast Schedule and Topics.