On My CAMH Sunrise Challenge 2026 - raised $1,675

It wasn't until my teenage years that I truly understood how mental health shapes us, how deeply it influences the decisions we make, the risks we avoid, the emotions we can't always control. I saw it in my friends, my family, and even in myself as struggles with pressure, self-doubt, the weight of expectation, are quite common. They are a lot of what being a teenager actually is. And with that recognition came a harder one: teenagers often navigate these challenges sometimes alone, with very little guidance.

When I was 14, my mom introduced me to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and their Sunrise Challenge, five mornings of walking together at sunrise to raise money for mental health care. Something shifted in me that week. I wasn't just noticing the problem anymore; I wanted to do something about it. In my first year I raised $1,300, mostly by emailing friends and family. It worked, but it felt incomplete. I was asking the people who already loved me to support a cause they already cared about. I wasn't actually starting any new conversations about mental health, just collecting from people who didn't need convincing.

The 2026 challenge was different. A few weeks earlier, I'd competed at U16 Volleyball Provincials in Toronto, and what I'd noticed there stayed with me. In a single arena, you can watch mental health play out in real time. A player's body language after a missed serve. The silence on a bench after a lost set. One harsh comment that drains the energy out of a whole team. Competitive sports concentrate exactly the kind of pressure I'd been thinking about, and the people inside it are some of the people most affected by it. So when I started fundraising for the Sunrise Challenge this year, I tried something different: I printed flyers and brought the conversation into the arena itself, where the topic wasn't abstract.

By the end of the weekend, I'd raised $1,675. More than the dollar amount, though, what

I'm still thinking about what that experience taught me. Part of it is practical, that the people most affected by an issue aren't always the easiest to reach about it, and that creating the conditions for a conversation matters as much as the conversation itself. But part of it is simpler than that. Mental health isn't a topic you wait for the right time to discuss. The right time keeps not coming. Sometimes you just have to walk up to someone in the middle of their hardest day and say: I see what you're carrying. Here's what we can do.

I'll do the Sunrise Challenge again next year. And the year after that. I don't think raising money is going to solve any of this. But I do think showing up, at sunrise, in an arena, in a conversation no one wanted to start, is at least the beginning of something.