Gwinnett volunteers pack mental health resource bags

I want to take you out to a really heartwarming story in Gwinnett County where thousands of volunteers are mobilizing to help better their community. Maria Guzman is live in Lawrenceville. And Maria, I understand that today, specifically where you're at, they're raising awareness about substance abuse, helping the community prevent injury and death. And I'm looking at our clock here. We have about three minutes or so. So take it away. Hey Ariel, yes, so here volunteers have packed these resource bags that are filled with education for parents and a big part of this is to have these bags go out into the community. So I'm going to go ahead and flip my camera to show you guys the amount of bags they've packed. About 2,000 I've heard within about two hours or so. So these volunteers worked very fast. But I want to go ahead and introduce you guys to one of the leaders here. Talk to me about what these bags have, what resources and when do you guys are going to hand them out? Wow. All right. So these bags we have here, we usually go out to the health communities across the community, a lot of health fairs. So most recently we're at Navigate Recoveries 5K. So a lot of these bags have things regarding suicide prevention. So how to kind of see signs of that and kind of help your child in crisis, kind of talking to teens more about the damage that alcohol and substances use, especially on their brain and their development, and also kind of helping parents know the signs of overdose and how to kind of prevent that. Gotcha. And you are with guys. So for people who are learning about the work that you guys do, Just talk to me about your mission and your focus. So the focus of GUIDE is to do substance use prevention and mental health awareness across Gwinnett County where we're based and across the state of Georgia. We do a lot of trainings within the community that are free to residents of Gwinnett County, Newton and Rockdale, usually based on suicide prevention, how to see signs that your teen might be in crisis and kind of how to help them and kind of get them to the resources and referrals that they need. Now, I've seen several volunteers today as someone who works with Guide. What goes through your mind seeing all these volunteers that are coming on a Saturday, excuse me, a Friday, and just donating their time? I mean, it's just so exciting to see. I mean, Gwinnett County is one of the biggest counties in the state, so we need all the help we can get, especially because we're so wide-reaching. So seeing so many residents come out and help is so, it's just kind of exciting to see, and it's really good to see.