Advising the Field: JED’s Partnership with Mantra Health

For more than 25 years, The Jed Foundation (JED) has worked on evidence-informed youth suicide prevention, partnering with colleges, universities, high schools, school districts, and community-based organizations to strengthen mental health and suicide prevention efforts and systems nationwide.

Effective student support depends on understanding campuswide needs. Identifying students at risk is a critical part of suicide prevention, and population-level screening is one way institutions can do it at scale. By mapping general health and well-being trends and revealing gaps in existing care, screening helps administrators adjust services and deploy resources to better protect student well-being.

JED’s Advisory Role with Mantra Health

As part of JED’s ongoing effort to advance screening and identification practices in higher education, the organization began consulting with Mantra following their initial development of Beacon. In this role, JED served as a subject-matter expert on implementation recommended practices.

Beacon is a platform that provides a real-time view of students’ physical health, mental health, academic stress, basic needs, and sense of belonging. It helps higher education institutions shift from reactive crisis response to proactive care and support. Instead of waiting for a student to reach a breaking point, the platform identifies emerging needs early. Beacon aims to help institutions proactively identify students who may be at risk of not finishing their college degree, allowing them to make more strategic, data-informed investments in long-term retention initiatives. It achieves this in three distinct ways:

• Connects students directly with relevant campus, regional, and national resources tailored to their needs.
• Gives counseling centers and other key departments on campus actionable, student-level data to triage and address pressing cases. The data helps campuses leverage the resources available to students across campus before they meet a crisis point.
• Provides population-level analytics that help administrators make smarter decisions about campuswide resources.

To learn more about Beacon’s early outcomes, read Mantra Health’s New Jersey Institute of Technology case study.

JED’s consultation focused on assisting Mantra in thinking through how to best support campuses with the implementation of their screening and analytics platform. To support that work, JED provided guidance across several key areas:

• Gathered insights from partner schools on how they’re currently using screening tools in practice, and what’s working in real-world settings to inform how Beacon should continue to evolve.
• Reviewed and provided feedback on an implementation guide, with attention focused on recommended practices for integrating screening tools into existing campus infrastructure and increasing student engagement with the tools.
• Participated in focus groups to share perspectives from the field, including how higher education institutions approach and adapt screening tools to fit their campus context and student population needs.
• Offered feedback on pilot school data and how findings can be translated into actionable stories for campus administrators.
• Provided feedback on recommended interventions designed to strengthen the connection between screening referrals and access to support.
• Co-hosted two webinars to support broader field-wide dialogue on screening practices in higher education.

Key Findings in the Field

Through a survey, roundtables, and interviews with campus partners, JED gathered feedback on what institutions are experiencing in the field, surfacing a few key themes.

Campuses are expanding proactive student support. Among the 24 surveyed campuses, 42% reported that they currently use universal screening tools to proactively identify students who may be at risk across multiple domains, including basic needs, mental health, and academic success. Of those campuses, 17% screen students campuswide, while the rest screen targeted populations (e.g., student athletes or first-year students).

“In terms of identifying students who are at risk, we really have nothing like this. If I had a magic wand, I would want to know who in this freshman class needs to be on our radar so we can try to help,” says a vice president at a JED partner campus.

Faculty, staff, and students often lack awareness of available resources. During conversations with campus partners, JED observed that the gap can be compounded by decentralization, particularly at large universities. Among the campuses surveyed, 45% reported that they aren’t confident in their institution’s ability to identify students with unmet needs related to belonging and connection to the campus community, highlighting the need for approaches that identify unmet needs before students reach a crisis point. Comprehensive toolkit guides and student navigation apps have helped close the gap, and additional tools, such as Beacon, can extend that effort by pairing resource connection with real-time insights.

Faculty, staff, and students tend to define well-being differently. Conversations with JED Campus partners also found that faculty and staff tend to approach student well-being through the lens of risk, focusing on campus safety, alcohol and substance use, mental health, and harm to self or others. Students are more likely to define their well-being as a sense of belonging — reflecting on whether they have a space on campus, feel welcomed, and feel safe in a sociopolitical sense.

Mantra’s Beacon platform aims to address some of the challenges highlighted by equipping institutions with the insights and data they need to be proactive with student support, establishing a common language around well-being, and connecting students to accurate, up-to-date resources both on- and off-campus.

“To make a significant impact on college student mental health, we encourage institutions to transition from a reactive safety net to a comprehensive system of preventive support. Early connection to resources like screening tools helps give a complete picture of student well-being, which is critical to protecting mental health and preventing suicide. We believe screening and early identification should be a priority at the state and system level, not just campus by campus, so that every student benefits from proactive support regardless of where they enroll,” says Dr. Tony Walker, Senior Vice President of School Programs and Consulting at JED.

Looking Ahead

As outlined in JED’s Comprehensive Approach, universal screening is a critical strategy for identifying students at risk before they reach crisis. JED’s consultation with Mantra Health on Beacon reflects a broader effort to strengthen the field and technology supporting youth mental health. That includes helping partners think through how tools can be integrated responsibly into existing campus infrastructure, and what institutions should consider when selecting and adapting screening approaches for their context. As the field continues to build out its capacity for proactive identification and early intervention, JED remains committed to advancing that work through consultation, thought leadership in the field, and responsible sharing of evidence-informed practice.

Disclaimer: JED is not a co-developer of Beacon. JED’s role is consultative in nature; recommendations provided by JED may or may not be reflected in the final implementation decisions made by Mantra Health or participating institutions.