Youth Mental Wellbeing: A Youth-Led Design Lab on Brain Health, the Arts and AI

Friday, May 1, 2026 | 1pm–3pm | UCLA Meyer & Renee Luskin Conference Center

On the first day of Mental Health Awareness Month — as California’s landmark Prop 1 Mental Health Accountability Act takes effect — UCLA’s Semel Institute Teen Advisory Council, well-known artists dedicated to community healing, SoCal youth organizations and OpenAI Academy will convene the people who can actually solve this: young Californians themselves.

Youth Mental Wellbeing: A Youth-Led Design Lab on Brain, Arts & AI is a first-of-its-kind participatory symposium at UCLA’s Luskin Conference Center bringing together youth leaders, artists, mental health experts, policymakers and AI technologists around a single animating principle: Youth lead. Adults support. AI assists.

• World-class artistic performances for 600 youth and adult allies showing that music, creativity, and cultural expression are not soft additions to mental health—they are the science
• Three panels of California’s most influential voices in government, mental health, technology, and philanthropy interspersed with the performances— present not to speak at young people, but to listen and be accountable to what they produce
• Youth leaders and mental health experts in conversation with OpenAI Academy leadership, on approaches to mental health technologies that make youth the drivers and beneficiaries 

This is a conference by youth, for California’s future.

The findings from May 1st will not go into a binder. They will travel — to the CA Behavioral Health Commission, to OpenAI’s community deployment strategy, and through a strategic arc that runs to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art grand opening, Super Bowl LXI at SoFi Stadium, and the LA 2028 Olympics. All in support of youth agency in crafting a mental wellbeing system.

California is the pilot. The world is watching.

Co-sponsors: UCLA Semel Institute Teen Advisory Council, UCLA Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital Next Gen Advisory Board, Healthsperian, OpenAI Academy, Charles Drew University’s Arts and Healing Initiative, Brotherhood Crusade, Social Justice Learning Institute, TGood Lab