Meeting People Where They Are: How Stay Another Day and Vibrant Are Breaking Silence Together
At Vibrant Emotional Health, we believe healing happens when people are met with compassion, care, and the resources they need, wherever they are in their journey. That’s why we’re proud to partner with Stay Another Day (SAD), a mental health–focused clothing brand founded by Mackenzie Nelson.
Last month during May–Mental Health Awareness Month–SAD and Vibrant launched a limited-edition collection celebrating vulnerability and the courage it takes to keep going. For Vibrant, this partnership reflects a shared commitment: to spark conversations, build community, and make mental health resources more visible and accessible—especially to those who might not know where to begin.
Vibrant staff and supporters gathered at White Horse Tavern in NYC to celebrate and shop the collection. A portion of apparel proceeds and 40% of every bar tab were donated to support Vibrant’s lifesaving work.
Mackenzie’s story exemplifies the vulnerability, creativity, and strength that drives Vibrant’s work every day.
From the outside, Mackenzie was the loudest voice in the dugout. Inside, she quietly struggled with anxiety, grief, depression, and isolation, topics not talked about in her hometown of Bloomington, Illinois.
“I didn’t understand that I was struggling with my mental health,” she says now. “I thought talking about my emotions was a weakness.”
She found comfort in creativity—learning to knit with her grandmother and later sewing to process difficult emotions. But her inner world grew heavier. Her grandmother passed suddenly, a softball teammate died by suicide, and arguments at home became routine. “I kept pushing it down because I didn’t know what it meant,” she says. “I just kept going.”
By college, the emotional weight took a physical toll. “I would hyperventilate at practices. I’d throw up before games,” she recalls. After transferring to another school closer to home, she was hospitalized for intensive mental health care. For the first time, she was surrounded by others who were open about their struggles, pain, and survival.
“Being alongside people openly talking about their mental health and openly wanting to get better really motivated me to do the same,” she says. “I realized vulnerability was so beautiful. I finally felt really seen.”
That moment planted the seed for what would become Stay Another Day, a brand built on one simple, life-saving truth: there is so much strength in asking for help.
A month later, an acute traumatic brain injury ended her college career. Mackenzie returned to sewing, creating clothes with hopeful messages—words she’d journaled for years: Stay Another Day. Many pieces include “988,” the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, stitched inside the sleeve—a quiet reminder that help is always within reach.
Three years later, Stay Another Day has sold over 100,000 items on TikTok, built a passionate online community, and grown into a 14-person team operating their Illinois storefront—including Mackenzie’s mom, dad, and sister. With comforting, conversation-starting designs, SAD meets people where they are—online, at home, at school, and in moments of quiet need.
“It just made me realize that just one person has to be like, ‘yeah, I struggle with this too,’ for more and more people to talk about it.”
“We’re so thrilled to partner with SAD,” says Lauren Reischer, director of the annual fund. “It is rare to enter into a partnership where both organizations are so closely aligned in their mission and campaign goals, which makes this all the more rewarding.”
For both SAD and Vibrant, this work is about more than crisis response—it’s about prevention, resilience, and reimagining what it means to access support.
One of Mackenzie’s proudest moments? Her high school installed a mural of her ‘99 Reasons to Stay’ design. “Five years ago, I was walking those halls trying to find one reason,” she says. “Now students have 99”.
Because healing begins by meeting people where they are and reminding them they’re never alone.
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