Chad’s Legacy Project was founded after the loss by suicide of CLP’s namesake after a brief struggle with Schizophrenia. CLP quickly adopted Mental Health Education as a pillar within it’s mission as a counter to the stigma Chad and his family and friends encountered. After multiple attempts to bring a graduation standard through the Washington State legislature, the ask evolved into a library by which teachers and school staff were provided easy access to programs, thereby eliminating the exhaustive search required until then.

The vision of the Mental Health Literacy Library (the first iteration of MentalHealthInstruction.org) was developed with the goal to begin with bringing quick and easy access to Mental Health Literacy to combat a burgeoning mental health crisis in high schools. This library would become a Beta site that would include rudimentary comparison tools and inclusion of evidence available for all listed programs.

In 2020, CLP engaged in a Consulting Services Agreement with the educational experts at the University of Washington SMART Center to provide research, testing and analysis services, and quantification expertise to help in developing the initial library. The SMART Center was to provide the compilation of programs for listing based on criteria borrowed from the Washington State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. CLP was to receive those packets of data and content and build the first site of it’s kind.

In August 2021, the Beta site was published.

Thanks to the generous support of the Satterberg Foundation, Elizabeth A. Lynn Foundation, The Muckleshoot Indian Tribe and Downtown Yakima Rotary, this new, professionally built site provides the comparison tools and accessibility originally envisioned in 2020. We are grateful to Conflare Studio in their tireless efforts to make this new site a reality.

In 2024, CLP reengaged with the UW SMART Center to expand from the current listings withing Mental Health Literacy, to categories that include Social Emotional Learning, Substance Misuse Disorders, Suicide Prevention and emerging curricula pertaining to Social Media Use. Those newly vetted programs, as a result, will be added over the course of May through June, 2025.

Following that, Mental Health Instruction library will also be the new home for Universal Mental Health Screening (UMHS) tools.  UMHS will be a new way for teachers to assess the needs in their specific schools and determine which standards and components are most important to them for program comparison.