Native Americans living in tribal communities lack access to things such as economic opportunity, well-funded education, and youth programs. Oftentimes, tribal communities do not have the resources to pay for large-scale programs and projects and must rely on aid programs or, in the case of the Hopi community, academic research labs. Dr. Vigil-Hayes and her research lab, Community Aware Networks and Information Systems (CANIS), have been working with the Hopi community to address the youth mental health crisis. While the Hopi community is relatively small at about thirteen thousand people, CANIS lab’s goal is to take the products developed for the Hopi community and genericize them to be usable by any other tribal communities who would be interested. Dr. Vigil-Hayes’ research focuses largely on asynchronous networking and creating useful network infrastructure that does not rely on a constant internet connection, so projects partnering with tribal communities like the Hopi where connectivity is often spotty give her a relevant real-world environment to conduct her research in.

The ARORA Community Mentor App Project consists of the creation of a community mentorship management app that coincides with an already existing ARORA Mental Health App for Hopi youth that CANIS lab created and deployed. This mentor app would give organization to the program in order to manage anonymously asked questions, mentee group mood reports, mentor dashboards, mentor contact information, and more. The mentor app would receive all incoming data from the ARORA app server, and serves as a portal for qualified mentors separate from the ARORA youth app. The integration of the Community Mentorship program would allow mentees and mentors to directly reach each other, thereby decreasing the scarcity of mental health care in tribal communities, and moving to improve the mental and behavioral health of Hopi youth.

There are currently no apps with widespread use that are similar to the proposed ARORA Community Mentor App. The app is specifically marketed to tribal community mentorship programs that use mood reports to monitor the mental health of their youth.

The inital concept for this project was provided by our sponsor, in the form of a Capstone project propoal.

Dr. Morgan Vigil-Hayes, Assistant Professor

Community Aware Networks and Information Systems (CANIS) Lab

School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems

Northern Arizona University

morgan.vigil-hayes@nau.edu

Meet Sanghvi

Software Developer and Grad Student Research Assistant

Community Aware Networks and Information Systems (CANIS) Lab ASU Decision Theater

Vist Canis Lab's website here.