Erika’s Lighthouse uses Google Workspace and Gemini for Google Workspace to create life-saving mental health programs for school communities worldwide.
Erika’s Lighthouse is a nonprofit that raises awareness about adolescent depression, encouraging good mental health, and reducing stigma surrounding mental health issues. Through classroom education, empowerment clubs, family engagement resources, and staff training, the nonprofit ensures students have the skills and resources to manage their own mental health.
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United States
Erika’s Lighthouse uses Google Workspace and Gemini for Google Workspace to create life-saving mental health programs for school communities worldwide.
Google Workspace Results
2x increase in students supported
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Supported 715k students from 2,500 schools in 49 states and 21 countries in 2023-2024 school year
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Reduced cost ratio per student from $5 to $2
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Accelerated content and curriculum development with Gemini for Google Workspace
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Freed up employees to focus on furthering the nonprofit’s mission
In 2004, Ginny and Tom Neuckranz suffered an unthinkable loss when their daughter took her own life. Fourteen-year-old Erika had been battling depression for over a year, and her death became the second student suicide in Chicago's North Shore community in that same school year. However, Erika’s passing also became an opportunity to shed light on adolescent depression, which . Founded in Erika’s name by her parents, has become a beacon of hope by creating mental health literacy in school communities.
"We focus on creating programming to help establish a shared set of values and vocabulary around adolescent mental health," says Brandon Combs, executive director at Erika’s Lighthouse. "We provide classroom education within school curricula, peer- and student-led mental health clubs and activities, staff training, and family engagement resources, all free of charge."
With a hybrid team of just 15 employees, Erika’s Lighthouse needs accessible, easy-to-use tools to communicate and collaborate internally and with the communities it supports. The organization previously relied on physical servers and traditional collaboration tools, which slowed down program development and made it challenging to work remotely. Now, by registering for and using the 70%+ discount for an advanced version of , Erika’s Lighthouse has the capabilities it needs to scale its offerings to more school communities worldwide.
Creating a safe port for mental health literacy
“Our school communities know their students better than we do. With Workspace, they can update our curriculum to make it resonate in the most impactful way with their student populations.” - Brandon Combs, Executive Director, Erika’s Lighthouse
Erika’s Lighthouse relies on three core platforms to support its work. HubSpot, used primarily for fundraising and marketing purposes, is the nonprofit’s main CRM, while Salesforce unifies its data to provide a better understanding of program performance. , along with solutions such as and , seamlessly plugs into both HubSpot and Salesforce to enable easier communication and more in-depth data analysis.
Workspace now brings all of Erika’s Lighthouse collaboration needs together under one roof. Beyond day-to-day communication, the team uses in place of time-consuming meetings. "We’re all so busy, so instead of all-staff meetings, we do a roundup of current projects and updates every two weeks," Combs says. "We can share what we’re working on, highlight recent wins, or celebrate personal successes, which really helps break down silos within our team and with our broader donor and school community."
The nonprofit also creates all program documents in Workspace, which means it never has to worry about version control once files are shared out to school partners. Everything lives in , which offers built-in security controls to grant the right level of access to the right people. The team builds all of its content for curriculum, staff training, and family workshops in and program guides for facilitators in . This makes it quick and easy to securely share materials with school partners who can then customize the content to their specific community.
"Our school communities know their students better than we do. With Workspace, they can update our curriculum to make it resonate in the most impactful way with their student populations," Combs explains. "On our side, Workspace gives us control over the foundational content: If we update one of our resources, we can trust that it’s updated everywhere."
Meanwhile, Erika’s Lighthouse processes all its backend data in BigQuery, a unified data platform, and uses Looker Studio, a data visualization tool, to provide real-time reporting or discover trends across communities. For example, Combs recently conducted the first study using data from the to evaluate the effectiveness of its programs. "Our goal is to ensure that every child has a trusted adult to turn to when seeking mental health support," Combs explains. "In our help-seeking study, we could clearly see discrepancies in the data we collect from minority predominantly Black or predominantly Hispanic schools compared to predominantly White schools, which helps us understand what we need to do to better support those communities."
To further spread the organization’s message and reach more schools in need of support, Erika’s Lighthouse leverages , another Google for Nonprofits offering, which provides up to $10,000 per month in donated Google Search ads to to help raise awareness and attract donors. The team uses Ad Grants to establish a digital presence that brings its programming to a broader audience. "This ability to continue our work, stay informed, and scale our offerings — all in one place — empowers us to get our programs into the hands of more schools and students," Combs says.
Embracing Gemini for Google Workspace to better support students
“This ability to continue our work, stay informed, and scale our offerings — all in one place — empowers us to get our programs into the hands of more schools and students.” - Brandon Combs, Executive Director, Erika’s Lighthouse
As a lean team with a global mission, Erika’s Lighthouse embraces opportunities to do more with less. The nonprofit adopted to automate repetitive tasks and accelerate content creation for its programs and communications. This includes the note-taking feature in to summarize meeting takeaways, "help me write" in Docs to produce grants and blog posts, and creating tables in to help organize data.
"We currently have about 250 free resources available for school communities, all of which are bilingual, and we create 25 to 30 new assets each year," Combs says. "Gemini has improved our ability to produce more evidence-informed, high-quality content for our programs." With Gemini supporting these processes, team members can now refocus their time on meaningful, mission-aligned work like onboarding new student-run mental health clubs, launching the nonprofit’s Youth Advisory Board, meeting with school partners or donors, hosting webinars, creating new resources, and more.
Combs also loves to use , custom AI experts that tailor Gemini responses to meet specific needs, to give his content a youthful voice. For instance, he’ll use the to rewrite content in language that’s appropriate for sixth graders or in the tone of a pirate to improve engagement, and the to help generate ideas for program names, concepts, and themes.
"We’re on a mission to change some of the language around adolescent mental health and what our organization does," Combs explains. "By collaborating with Gemini, we’re learning to be less humble and leaning into the fact that we really are saving lives."
Pointing school communities in the right direction
“By uncovering the key drivers of depression in young people, we really believe that we can foster a mentally healthy generation through literacy and education. Gemini and Google for Nonprofits helps make this possible.” - Brandon Combs, Executive Director, Erika’s Lighthouse
As Erika’s Lighthouse looks to the future, the team is using Gemini to create more focused content around adolescent mental health. Its upcoming toolboxes will provide self-guided psychoeducation programs for teens and families, while its new one-day lessons will provide in-depth learning on specific topics such as suicidal ideation, anxiety, or stress. The nonprofit currently has programming for grades 4 to 12, but with the help of Gemini, it will soon expand its offering to a full range of programs for kindergarten and up, making their content even more accessible to youth of all ages.
"In the 2023-2024 school year, Erika’s Lighthouse impacted 715,000 youth globally. We’re already at 425,000 this year and we’re not even halfway through the school year," Combs says. "By uncovering the key drivers of depression in young people, we really believe that we can foster a mentally healthy generation through literacy and education. Gemini and Google for Nonprofits are instrumental in achieving our mental health mission."