With the end of the semester approaching fast, finals are heavy on the minds of students, according to Natural Helpers president Sophia Earle. She said that in order to help students manage stress levels, the club has been hosting “Chill Week” through Change to Chill.

“Each day from Tuesday the 17th to Friday the 20th, we’ll be offering just a whole bunch of different fun resources,” Earle said. “We have motivational cards for students, stress balls and fun ‘Change to Chill’ merchandise.”

Sophomore and Natural Helpers vice president Chloe Lorentz said she wanted to help other students through this time, since many students share the same sense of anxiety during finals.

“I’m someone who is very anxious, so I thought that it would be good to help others with that and use myself as a resource, and help myself learn and other people learn too,” Lorentz said.

Earle said Natural Helpers had been preparing for this “Chill Week” for some time, considering what would be most useful for Park students.

“Natural Helpers prepared for ‘Chill Week’ by meeting every other Monday the past few weeks and we talked about what we thought people would like for de-stress resources during finals week,” Earle said.

Co-advisor Barb Nelson said that providing even small trinkets on a table outside the lunchroom can make an impact to reduce stress.

“(The Natural Helpers) were just looking to provide an opportunity to have a little bit of an outlet and look at some fun things, like stress balls, notebooks that people could journal in, some stickers and different fun things to have on the table,” Nelson said.

Earle said that finals, combined with the myriad of other things in students’ lives, made this “Chill Week” imperative for the club.

“It’s really important for students to have extra support during finals week because there are a lot of tests going on (and) a lot of different extracurricular activities happening all at once,” Earle said. “It can just be really overwhelming, so any little support or big support in the school can help out with that.”

According to Earle, the next step for Natural Helpers is learning even more about supporting fellow students’ mental health.

“Our upcoming plans for Natural Helpers would be to pair up with someone from Change to Chill to get some training in how to best help our school’s resources for mental health and how we can be a better support for the students at SLP,” Earle said.