It was a packed night, and a first, for the Swift Current Community Youth Initiative on Monday, as they held a Dessert Night Fundraiser to raise awareness for youth mental health.  

Over 100 people were at The Center, which featured desserts for those in attendance, items raffled and auctioned off, as well as live music from Justine Sletten. 

Nathan Wiebe, executive director of the Swift Current Community Youth Initiative, said the night was amazing. 

"It was a great turnout, and it was just a great event overall to have people in The Center," he said. "We've never done an event like this one before where we have a dessert night where we are doing it for a cause. We had lots of great feedback, and people, from what we saw and what we heard, had an amazing time." 

Wiebe said the reason they wanted to hold the event was to spread the awareness about youth and mental health. 

"A lot of times we do talk about the mental health side, but we forget that the young people in our community are those who are the tomorrow of Swift Current and the southwest," he explained. "We can maybe address this with kids and hopefully encourage them to talk about it more and to seek help if needed."

"That's the end goal. We want kids to ask for help if they need it. We want that stigma of mental health to be broken, so we can get kids on the right track," Wiebe added. "We see depression, anxiety, and all these things are very prevalent, and we deal with them weekly, so we want to touch on the subject, and we want to bring awareness to it." 

Wiebe said with the amount of access that youth have and with all the 'societal and cultural changes in the world', everything takes a toll.

"We are seeing different challenges come our way within counselling, within our mentorship," he said. "The only way our youth are going to have the courage to face their mental health battles head-on is if we have the courage to talk about it. If we can talk about and we can give people the tools to know how to bring this up and to encourage their kids and to seek help, and we are hopefully dealing with this problem and those kids that do deal with it, empowering them to talk about it with their peers." 

Wiebe added that they don't have a number yet on how much money they made. He admitted it wasn't about raising money, but more about raising awareness. What they do raise will go towards the counselling service.