Marques Watts is not new to the limelight.
In 2021, Watts publicly shared some seminal moments that changed the way he saw the world as a young person. One incident was his first encounter with police at the age of 13. Visiting his father in Skokie, Watts was walking to Dunkin’ Donuts with his headphones on when a white police officer stopped him.
“He asked me where I was going, to empty my pockets …,” Watts said. “I remember the fear. I didn’t want to make any wrong moves.”
Watts shared the story while he was a senior at Mather High School in West Ridge. At the time, he was mourning the deaths of his younger brother, Derrion Umba Ortiz, and his friend, Caleb Reed. Their deaths changed him, mentally, he said. At the time, he said he had two options: Stay in the grieving stage or use his voice to make changes.
He chose the latter and stepped through Communities United’s (CU) doors — Chicago’s survivor-led, grassroots, intergenerational, racial justice organization where youth talk about their experiences. Watts became a youth leader advocating for change in his neighborhood and others, a change that included his school council voting in favor of removing police officers who work as school resource officers. Following Watts’ interaction with police, he felt uncomfortable seeing them in school settings, as their presence made him feel he was always doing something wrong. In his CU role, he made it a point to reassure other youth who had similar encounters with police, telling them: “You’re not in the wrong. Don’t feel like you are.”
“That’s what needs to happen with Black youth. We need reassurance that we’re not doing anything wrong,” Watts said.
Communities United youth will share their opinions and thoughts on mental health at a summit at 10 a.m. Saturday, May 16, at the El Centro Library and Learning Center at Northeastern Illinois University. The youth-led event will bring together community organizations, hospital leaders, policymakers and funders to begin designing a citywide mental health plan for young adults.
This month, Watts graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a bachelor’s degree in social welfare. While there, he leaned into leadership roles that centered the Black community, including taking lessons he learned from Communities United on narrative change, advocacy and agency on campus. Now, he has a master’s degree in mind, anticipating sitting at tables where policy conversations happen, using his experience growing up in low-income environments to assist resource-poor communities.
“I want to be in those conversations where we’re talking about what community needs what,” Watts said. “I want to get back inside these communities, be a representative and be that person that can help uplift them.”
The mindset is shared by other Communities United youth leaders, such as Arianna Brandt, a senior at Michele Clark Academic Prep Magnet High School in Austin. She said CU helped her redirect her shyness to finding her voice. CU taught her how to speak up for herself, her friends and her future — one that includes attending Chicago State University and becoming an entrepreneur. Brandt remembers CU youth stepping up to share their feelings about the snap curfew with elected officials and attending city council meetings where the issue was on the agenda.
At the summit, leaders like Brandt will meet with organizations such as the Kedzie Center to develop a five-year mental health plan.
“Youth are coming together to change the narrative, because people view us as troublemakers … but we’re not bad kids,” Brandt said. “If youth don’t step up and have a conversation around this, then adults are going to put something in place that doesn’t take our views into consideration.”
Roughly one-third of young adults in the U.S. have negative views of their mental health, according to a 2025 survey by the Pew Research Center. Among youth, more than 5.3 million, or 20.3% of adolescents 12 to 17 years old, had a current, diagnosed mental or behavioral health condition in 2023, including anxiety, depression or behavior/conduct problems. Anxiety was the most common condition at 16.1%, followed by depression at 8.4% and behavior/conduct problems at 6.3%, according to a national survey of children’s health data.
“There are disparities in mental health care, and it’s on us to be thinking about how we can better serve communities in need,” Dr. Andrea Spencer, vice chair for research in the Pritzker Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, said.
For more than a decade, Communities United has worked with Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago in a number of efforts, including ending the zero-tolerance expulsion policy in Illinois public schools, expanding public health approaches such as restorative justice and engaging youth as advisory members to guide substance-use prevention.
The duo’s current endeavor is a “Healing Through Justice” framework that psychiatrists and institutions can use to promote mental health and wellness across communities. The model fosters new partnerships with adults and institutional leaders who support youth-driven leadership and solutions to address community needs.
It garnered the attention of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Racial Equity 2030 Challenge, a global competition to help build and scale actionable ideas for transformative change in systems and institutions that uphold racial inequities. In 2022, CU and Lurie Children’s were awarded $10M by the Kellogg Foundation to scale the framework and, in the process, heal youth and their communities.
Dr. John Walkup, chair of the Pritzker Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at Lurie Children’s, is excited to see what young people come up with to address behavioral health on a population level. People coming to terms with who they are, taking a look at the world they live in and then working to make it better is a process every youth-facing group should have in their repertoire, he said. “It changes how we talk about trauma,” Walkup said. “I make the joke: Michigan Avenue used to be beachfront until the Great Chicago Fire. That’s what human beings do. They build greatness on disaster, and we need to help people choose that pathway. That pathway to greatness is really what healing through justice is all about.”
Angela Sedeño, licensed clinical psychologist and executive director of the Kedize Center, a community-funded mental health center on the Northwest Side that provides accessible, culturally-informed therapy, is looking forward to Chicago youth helping to shape the services provided to themselves and their peers.
“They want to be a part of creating services that are designed for them…this (plan) gives them something they can practically do, and leaves them with a greater sense of hope,” Sedeño said.
Watts agreed.
“When you see what youth can put together on their own, and how well they can facilitate, it’s an eye-opener to the public,” he said. “It changes their perspective of how we actually treat youth, and the expectations that we have for youth.”
