Christina Guilbeau is no stranger to the tumult of adolescence. In part, those difficult years are what inspired her to teach middle school in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with Teach for America. It was only in therapy as an adult, though, that Christina realized her own challenging middle school years may have been the start of her mental health struggles. More than half of the mental illness cases in the U.S. begin by age 14, she learned, yet 14 million children attend schools with no mental health staff.
As a teacher, Christina witnessed the damage caused by a lack of access to mental health services, particularly among adolescents in underserved communities. After finishing her time with Teach for America, she knew she wanted to scale her impact beyond the 30 students in her classroom, and she enrolled at the GSB. “I was drawn to the GSB specifically because of its dedication to social innovation,” Christina says. While there, it was a former student’s mental health crisis and Christina’s desire to support her that made Christina’s calling clear: she would fill the gap in low-cost mental health support for youth in need.
In 2019, Christina founded Hopebound with funding she was awarded as one of two students to receive the Stanford Social Innovation Fellowship. Hopebound matches under-resourced middle and high school students with supervised student clinicians for weekly teletherapy sessions at no or low cost. In addition to providing students with talk therapy that may otherwise be inaccessible to them, Hopebound helps master’s students earn the hours they need to complete their degrees, all under the supervision of a licensed clinician. What began as a pilot program in Atlanta has now provided thousands of therapy sessions to students by partnering with families, schools, and afterschool programs throughout the state of Georgia. “Christina’s ability to translate lived experience into systemic innovation exemplifies the best of what GSB alumni can do,” says Jessica Patton, MBA ’19. “With empathy, rigor, and purpose, Christina is changing lives today and building infrastructure that will support better mental health access for generations.”
