organizational partners
Project HEAL is here to offer support to people with eating disorders in their efforts to receive the treatment they need to heal, but as a remote and national organization, we are not on-call to offer support to people in crisis. Other eating disorder nonprofits like The Alliance and ANAD offer helplines if you need immediate eating disorder support. But we thought it was important to offer a resource to people who are following us online or applying for our support to have somewhere to turn if they feel activated, overwhelmed, or unable to keep themselves safe. That's why we partner with the Crisis Textline. Anytime, day or night, that you feel you need crisis support, you can text HEALING to 741741 and be connected to a crisis counselor. We know it's stressful to have an untreated eating disorder, and we want you to have as much support as possible.
At Project HEAL, we know that eating disorder prevention is suicide prevention. 25-33% of people with eating disorders have thought about suicide, compared the national average of 4.3%. We've partnered regularly with the JED Foundation, a leading national nonprofit focused on suicide prevention among teens and young adults, in our efforts to shatter the stigma around eating disorders and prevent people who struggle with eating disorders from thinking that suicide is one of their options. Our CEO Rebecca Eyre is one of the JED Foundation's Subject Matter Experts on eating disorders, and she's helped the JED Foundation in their efforts to provide meaningful resources and support to the young people they serve who might be struggling in their relationship with food and body.
Project HEAL is a proud member of the Collaborative of Eating Disorder Organizations (CEDO), formerly the NEDA Network. CEDO is a collective of mission-aligned organizations in the US dedicated to raising public awareness around disordered eating and eating disorders. Stronger together, we provide a unified voice advocating to advance eating disorders care, giving voice to all communities impacted, while creating a space for member organizations to support one another. We're so grateful that all of these organizations with different missions, focuses, and program offerings are able to come together towards a common goal.
Project HEAL is committed to ensuring that those with the least access to resources are provided the support they need to ensure their healing. Our partners at Fighting Eating Disorders in Underreprepresented Populations (FEDUP) are especially focused on providing resources to transgender, gender nonconforming, and intersex (TGNCI) people have support in their journey of healing their relationships with food and body. We work with FEDUP to ensure that TGNCI people have access to the treatment they need to heal.
Since 2019, Project HEAL has been working closely with the Kennedy Forum, the national leader in mental health parity in the U.S. The Kennedy Forum has invested in Project HEAL's efforts to create equitable access to eating disorder care, acknowledging that the eating disorder treatment landscape is plagued by some of the most egregious parity violations in all of mental healthcare through learnings gleaned from their www.dontdenyme.org project. We continue to work closely with them in our efforts to push for parity and equity in eating disorder treatment insurance coverage.