Alanna Sethi

As a young person with mental health conditions, Alanna is incredibly passionate about early intervention and prevention to reduce the distress and impact mental health can have on young people's lives and help them instead flourish. Alanna is the CEO and founder of HOPE (Helping Our Planet Earth), a youth-led non-profit organisation which she uses to make mental health support available to young people internationally through mental health education, peer support and youth leadership training. Alanna’s challenges in moving abroad for her education have given her a global perspective and insight into the difficulties others face and the potential obstacles to finding a sense of self and community. However, she has been successful in finding support, and wishes to become a clinical psychologist herself so she can help young people with similar difficulties. 

As the leader of HOPE, Alanna supervises a team of four permanent youth staff, providing them with professional mentorship and supervision, peer support, and academic advice. Up to 15 part-time youth volunteers also work for HOPE, all of them full-time high school or undergraduate students aged 16 to 24 from various countries around the world. Informing HOPE’s work, Alanna is conducting research on linguistic equity to increase accessibility to education for people with disabilities and BIPOC communities, as well as investigating prevention-focused mental health interventions for young people. This has the aim of reducing stigma around mental health and facilitating culturally sensitive mental health conversations across all communities. 

In 2024 alone, Alanna received the Jackman Humanities Institute Scholar-in-Residence, Dean’s List Scholar and Sustainable Action Award at the University of Toronto, the Laidlaw Undergraduate Leadership and Research Scholarship from the Laidlaw Foundation and was named a winner of the Youth Leaders Award by Global Citizen. Previously, she was the recipient of Bronze and Silver Awards in the Queen's Commonwealth Essay Competition for 2020 and 2021 respectively. Alanna is also a creative writer and is currently writing a fictional novel looking at the impacts of mental health on interpersonal relationships, as well as planning a narrative non-fiction book on youth mental health advocacy in the Asia-Pacific region to inspire other young people to pursue advocacy work. 

If she wins the Global Student Prize, Alanna will use the prize funds to sponsor HOPE’s further activities. Currently HOPE runs completely on the kindness of volunteers. Extra funding would help it deliver over 700 hours of mental health programming for the most vulnerable youth communities across the Asia-Pacific region including Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Thailand, and Fiji. This would be delivered in partnership with local schools and community-based organisations who might not otherwise be able to afford mental health programs. Winning the Global Student Prize would also facilitate the development of partnerships with schools and communities to expand impact and reach.