How one Bruin is growing a new model of mental health support on campus

When Ryen Clark toured UCLA as a prospective student, one community space immediately caught her attention: the Black Bruin Resource Center. She remembers stepping inside and feeling warmth and community she had not experienced before on a college campus. Students were studying but also playing UNO and excitedly sharing music recommendations. The space ended up playing a meaningful role in her decision to enroll at UCLA.

Now a fourth-year psychology student, Clark is helping shape the center's offerings for the next generation of Bruins. Through her spearheading of the Black Bruin Resource Center's Mental Health & Wellness Initiative, she is expanding how Black students at UCLA experience and understand mental health.

For Clark, the work is also deeply personal.

Upon arriving at UCLA, the Sacramento native joined the Afrikan Diaspora Living Learning Community, one of dozens of university housing collectives that bring together students around shared identities and interests. Clark says she and her roommates quickly gravitated to the Black Bruin Resource Center, or BBRC, as a place to gather between classes. Over time, she says it became a second home.

However, it wasn't an easy start at UCLA for Clark. Fall 2022 coincided with the long tail of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many students were still recalibrating to in-person life. "Life just unpaused," she said. "A lot of people didn't know how to cope, how to readjust. I remember my freshman year being very overwhelming."

That experience shaped her commitment to creating space for students to process what they were - and still are - collectively going through. Clark's initiative began to take shape in 2024, as she and the center staff explored how to create an opportunity for conversations around mental health rooted in community, resilience and accessibility.

"This is a chance for Black students on campus to further understand what mental health is in their context," said Clark, whose official title is mental health and wellness supervisor at the center. "It's for them to be aware of some of the stigma and misconceptions that have existed in our community around it."

The initiative partners with UCLA Counseling and Psychological Services, or CAPS, the RISE Center and the CARE program to host events on topics ranging from anxiety and depression to coping with crises. Several workshops over the last year have focused on processing the recent Los Angeles fires and their impact on students and families.

Other gatherings have invited students to explore wellness through art and music, including a song association event that Clark said had students singing and dancing together.

"There's mental health in community and in song and in just lifting up joyous noise together - so many different things," Clark said. "Students are opening their eyes and realizing, 'Oh, this is taking care of myself, too.'"

Clark's emphasis on helping individuals find things in their daily lives to address mental health reflects her broader goal: to help de-westernize psychology and make it accessible and relevant to Black students in their own context.

One way the initiative is doing this is by offering tangible, everyday resources. The center's mental health and wellness corner offers cubbies with stress balls, fidget tools, essential oil stickers, pamphlets on topics like box breathing and other coping techniques, and necessities like feminine products.

"Seeing students come up and say, 'Wow, this is so cool. Can I take this?' And being able to say, 'Yes, you can.' It just means a lot," Clark said.

As part of the initiative, the center also hosts weekly drop-in hours with a CAPS clinician, allowing students to access professional support in a familiar environment.

For Audrey Hudlin, a UCLA alumna and the center's program manager, that accessibility represents a meaningful shift. As an undergraduate, Hudlin said she knew campus mental health services existed, but rarely heard peers talk openly about using them.

"It's nice to see that students feel comfortable utilizing the CAPS drop-in services we offer at the center," said Hudlin, who graduated in 2017 with a bachelor's degree in global studies. "That's really encouraging."

While the BBRC didn't exist when she was an undergraduate, Hudlin has been drawn to the opportunity to encourage students to build community in ways she wished she had during her college years. Hudlin joined the BBRC team in 2024 and now oversees signature programs and supervises student staff.

"I felt like I could really be of service here, helping students have a better experience at UCLA than I did," said Hudlin, who struggled as an out-of-state student to find community-building spaces on a campus as large as UCLA.

"A space like this could have allowed me to build more lasting relationships with my peers. I love that I'm able to witness meaningful friendships blossom among students who have found a home at the BBRC."

With the BBRC initiative, Clark hopes students continue to learn that resilience does not mean stoicism. "How do we grow through things that we go through as students?" she said. "And not just push through?"

As Clark prepares to graduate, she is carefully considering how to maintain continuity for current and future Bruins. This year, she launched the Black Psychology Society, a student organization designed to complete the initiative's work by exposing students to research opportunities and career pathways in psychology.

"It's a very similar mission," she said, "rooted in helping students get those resources and understand that psychology is incredibly broad."

Hudlin sees that kind of leadership as reflective of the BBRC's model, where student vision is supported by staff infrastructure. "The success of spaces like this depends on centering student voices," Hudlin said. "And Ryen has done that beautifully."