Yellow Tulip Project takes root in Nelson County

Hope Gardens deal with issues related to mental health

Community leaders in Nelson County noticed a pattern: Kids were more stressed and they had fewer outlets for building meaningful connections.

Seeking to fill those gaps, they opted Nelson County into a national movement called the Yellow Tulip Project, which helps break the stigma around mental health and gives communities positive outlets as they plant yellow tulips.

Now, roughly a year later, Bardstown social worker Olivia Raley has been named one of Rotary International’s Champions of Tomorrow for her involvement in the project. Raley is the only person from the United States to win this year. Other winners are from Italy, India, the Philippines, Colombia and Uganda.

“It’s very humbling that it’s my name,” said Raley, adding that everyone involved in the project deserves as much credit, including the Tri County United Way, Lincoln Trail Health Department, Department for Community Based Services, the Family Resource and Youth Services Centers, WellCare and others. “No pun intended but they deserve their flowers just as much as I do, because it’s just like systems in any capacity: If one pillar breaks, the whole thing collapses.”

Yellow tulips often are associated with positivity and hope.

They “serve as a powerful symbol of hope — planted in the fall, enduring the harsh winter, and emerge in spring as vibrant Hope Gardens,” according to Laura Vessels with WellCare of Kentucky. “This process represents resilience — the ability to weather life’s storms and emerge stronger, especially in the context of mental health.”

Several local leaders said youth lacked activities in Nelson County to foster a sense of community.

“What we found is that there’s nothing for youth to do in rural Nelson County. There’s no more bowling alleys. The movie theater has closed; the skating rink has closed,” Raley said. “… the youth are so forgotten.”

Youth deal with anxiety around school attendance and grades, and during COVID-19 many navigated first isolation then resocialization.

Kelly Huckelby works as an assistant with Family Resource and Youth Services Centers focused on Cox’s Creek and Foster Heights elementary schools. The kids she works with, she said, worry about everything from turning in their homework to “things at home.”

She and others in her program go into classrooms and teach children about emotional regulation — and they work to validate any fears the children have. Understanding, respecting and addressing those fears lays the groundwork for a person who can go through life and not stigmatize mental health, she said.

“We want people to talk about mental health, not as a stigmatizing thing, but as … something that people deal with, and it’s no different than if you fall and cut yourself on the ground,” she said. “It’s just … something that we have to learn to navigate, and we want to instill healthy ways of navigating and coping with the challenges that they may be presented with.”

The national Yellow Tulip Project launched because a teenager, Julia Hansen, “felt alone in dealing with her own depression,” according to the project’s website. She felt stigma blocked her and others from reaching out for support.

The nonprofit promotes mental health through several different programs, including Hope Gardens, which encourage communities to come together and plant and care for a garden of yellow tulips.

“We want to make sure that our kiddos within Nelson County and then the Bardstown community know that there are people there to help and there’s hope for living with mental illness,” Huckelby said.

Since Nelson County launched its Yellow Tulip Project, it’s grown to 20 community gardens. Nelson County also has a “Yellow Tulip Week” during which people wear yellow and get together for scavenger hunts and other activities. Kids can participate in an art contest during this week as well.

“We really wanted to involve activities that youth can do by themselves, or make it a family thing. So if you don’t have any caretakers, or if you don’t have a very positive family dynamic, then you can do these things on your own or with your friends,” Raley said. “We didn’t want it to be restrictive to a certain socioeconomic status or a certain class. We wanted to make sure that anybody and everybody from all age groups, from every background, can be involved with it.”

Nelson County leaders know planting flowers alone can’t solve every issue youth face, but say it’s a good starting point with a lot of — and growing — buy-in from the community.

“Obviously, planting yellow tulips isn’t ‘solving’ the problem, but it’s at least bringing awareness to it, getting the community to be aware of it,” said Laura Sedlatschek, executive director of TriCounty United Way who has been involved in the program since the ouset.

With that awareness and education comes “greater responsibility to do more,” Vessels said.

“With every effort, we’re making progress toward smashing the stigma surrounding youth mental health and reinforcing the message that there is always hope,” she said.

There is ample room for broader policy change to help youth. Nelson County leaders involved in the tulip project said teaching kids about dealing with complicated emotions in school can help them in the long run and recognizing mental health as part of the hierarchy of needs is important.

“Each and every day, I wake up in a safe house. I turn the lights on; I run my water to brush my teeth and take a shower. A lot of people don’t do that,” Raley said. “And people need to really understand — especially in positions of power — really need to understand that right now, it’s a luxury to be able to live in a safe, warm or cool house, where you have food in your fridge, you have access to transportation.”

Building positive mental health, she said, starts with having food and clothes and feeling safe and sheltered.

“If somebody is fighting to struggle and survive for their basic needs,” Raley said, “nothing else in that pyramid is even going to be touched.”