As a community-based therapist, Julius Boatwright worked with families to ensure the safety of their children. But when his work with a given family would come to a close, sometimes they’d ask, “Why does your time with us have to end?”

After a session with a family in the Hill District in March 2016, Boatwright, who’d been involved in social work and mental health for four years, sat in his car and thought, “I need to do more.”

“I drove a little bit away from the family's home and I went, got out and I was just like, ‘I want to find a Black person in this neighborhood and I just want to, like, start talking with them about mental health.’ And I did that.”

He asked strangers sitting on their porches: “What do you need? What do you want when you think about mental health?”

Boatwright said a woman invited him into her living room, where they talked about mental health for two hours. When their conversation ended, he went to the nearest ATM and withdrew $20 to compensate the stranger, and they took a selfie together.

That interaction led to Steel Smiling, a nonprofit that helps bridge the gap between Black Pittsburghers and mental health services. As its founder and director, Boatwright launched Steel Smiling in December 2015. Since then, he’s grown and developed it substantially from just sending resources to folks online.

But it all started with that conversation.

“It was like the first conversation that I ever had with someone outside of my job that I was like, ‘Oh, this is different,’” he said. “And then from there it went from that initial conversation with a Black resident in the community to you know now, nine years later, we're preparing for our 10 years of existence.”

‘This needs to be tangible’

In 2015, Boatwright had envisioned an online mental health resource. And though the organization has served  that purpose — with access and awareness at the forefront of its mission — Boatwright felt strongly that “This needs to be tangible.”

“People need to experience mental health, wellness, peer support groups, collective care, self-care,” he said. “That's how we raise their awareness, educate them, advocate with them, and activate folks in community to become mental health advocates, mental health liaisons or like more specialized folks within the field.”

Steel Smiling transformed from an online space for resource sharing to a physical one that provides “in-depth experiences that are either around education, advocacy, awareness, support, treatment, referrals to treatment and care,” Boatwright said.

In 2019, Steel Smiling became an organization-in-residence with Neighborhood Allies, an intermediary nonprofit that partners with and provides support to grassroots organizations, said Stephanie Miller, senior vice president and chief operating officer of Neighborhood Allies.

Neighborhood Allies provides support that aids in various aspects of running a non-profit including human resources, marketing, fundraising, strategy and development, said Miller, but the mission and vision of the organization still lies in the hands of Boatwright and his team. The initiative was created with the idea that eventually, Steel Smiling will become an independent entity, said Miller, and the two nonprofits meet annually to discuss next steps for the partnership.

Miller said working with Steel Smiling has been one of the highlights of her career.

“This is decades long work, right?” she said. “It's going to take so long to destigmatize mental health as a whole, but then you add that to one of the most repressed groups in America and the current climate that we're dealing in — it's going to be difficult to sort of continue that fight. But absolutely worth it.”

Boatwright likens the organization’s growth to a line on a graph steadily trending upward, which he attributes to the Pittsburgh community responding to a call for action.

“It's just that formula of people saying and believing that mental health is a birthright. We all deserve to have access to mental health, and folks offering up support with the tools and resources and knowledge that they have,” he said. “It literally would not exist if it wasn't for the way that the community at large stepped in, stepped up and then poured into it consistently over the years.”

One of Steel Smiling’s programs is Beams to Bridges, a six-month training program that focuses on a different neighborhood in Pittsburgh with each cycle. It aims to give Black adult residents of those neighborhoods the knowledge, competency, skills and comfort to become a mental health advocate for themselves and their communities and provides components of workforce development. Participants are paid, and dinner is provided at each session.

As Hill District resident Rakeem Collins said in 2019, a friend had asked him to join the inaugural Beams to Bridges cohort that was focused on the South Hilltop neighborhood where he worked in construction at the time.

When Collins joined, it was slated to be an eight-month program. But it was extended to two years in order to support the cohort through the COVID-19 pandemic. Collins described the group’s work during that time as “extremely needed and necessary.” Members learned about different types of conditioning, trauma and resilience responses, and how to identify conditions like depression and psychosis, he said.

“We basically took like a 10-year psychology class in two years,” Collins said.

Years after graduating from the program, Collins remains with Steel Smiling today. He is independently contracted to run a men’s group that meets twice a month in partnership with East End community center, the Kingsley Association. At its peak, Collins said the group featured 30 regular attendees.

Collins said Steel Smiling has helped teach him how to regulate and understand his emotions, and “how to give myself to the world.”

When leading the men’s group, Collins said he gives the attendees everything he’s gone through as a father, a son, an uncle and a brother.

“A lot of times in our communities, we have to carry the burden of taking care of everyone,” he said.

“Being able to share that with the men's group, and they're like, ‘You know what? I feel the same exact thing. I go through that every day — and to know I'm not the only one. It gives us a safe space for people to really be able to share everyday experiences.’”

‘Healing is possible’

Beams to Bridges isn’t the only Steel Smiling project that took off during the pandemic. Steel Healing, launched originally as the Black Mental Health Fund in March 2020, has provided over $500,000 toward mental health treatment for people in Pittsburgh, Boatwright said.

Steel Healing consists of three pillars — wellness navigation services, the Black Mental Health Fund and peer services — that ensure community members can access the treatment they want or need. Though Steel Smiling is not a medical provider that offers therapy or treatment directly, its coordinators can help connect community members to the services they’re seeking.

As peer support fellows with Steel Smiling, Meleak Potter and Cheyenne Campbell’s roles include checking in on community members who contact the organization for assistance or direction and leading support groups.

“I think that people assume when you think of mental health, you immediately think therapists or psychiatrists,” said Campbell, who joined the organization in June. But in a peer support role, she and Potter are able to show people that mental wellness can be community-focused, not just clinical.

“There's a lot of stigma behind going to see a therapist and going to a psychiatrist,” Campbell said. “And as peers, we are not therapists, nor psychiatrists. We're not in a clinical position, but we had those similar experiences, maybe similar backgrounds and cultures, and we’re able to support someone's wellness journey in that way.”

Campbell, 28, a Homewood native, grew up in predominantly Black neighborhoods, where she sees the “the devastating effects of systemic racism and how that affects every single person.” Campbell says that, in Pittsburgh, Black communities especially experience gun and gender violence, which leads to poverty and makes Black mental health support a necessity.

About 22.5% of Pittsburgh’s population is Black, according to 2024 U.S. Census Bureau data, and 63.7% is white. While Black men comprise about 6% of the city’s population, they were annually the victims of 66% of homicides on average from 2016-2021, according to a report from the Allegheny County Health Department. During those years, Black residents of Allegheny County were 21 times more likely to be victims of a homicide than white residents.

“On the flip side of all of the negatives... there's also so much Black freedom and so much Black joy, too,” Campbell said. “So we don't want to just focus on the mental illness and like the devastating parts of it. We're also intentional about creating joyful, liberating spaces too.”

Potter, who joined in November, said he believes that Steel Smiling “stands as the spine that attaches to the nervous system of Black Pittsburgh and their mental health.”

Both Potter and Campbell said much of the nonprofit’s success comes from practicing what it preaches. Some of their fondest memories have come from their team meetings that include check-ins with each other.

“You don't really get in a job and be like, ‘I feel like I'm a consumer and an employee at the same time.’ I'm living off of what we're giving out,” Potter explained. “So being in this position is just, it's been so eye-opening.”

Boatwright said part of the nonprofit’s work is raising multi-generational awareness that will continue to create a new way of thinking about mental health and wellness.

“At our team meetings, we task ourselves with planting seeds to trees that we're never going to be around to see grow,” he said.

In the near decade that Steel Smiling has been serving Pittsburgh, Boatwright said he and his team have felt and witnessed a growing sense of hope, faith and belief in both individual and collective healing in the Black community.

“When folks participate and offer up their true selves and their stories in our community events and experiences and programs, it creates pathways for that healing,” he said. “So folks are like, ‘Oh, healing is possible.’”

To connect with mental health resources through Steel Smiling, call 412-390-5545. If you or a loved one is experiencing a mental health crisis, call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact UPMC’s resolve Crisis Services hotline at 1-888-796-8226.

Allie Miller (allie.l.mill@gmail.com) is a freelance journalist living in New Stanton.

First Published: March 20, 2025, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: March 21, 2025, 4:10 p.m.