This story contains references to suicide.
Celestine Wenardy ’25 has worn many hats at the Bridge, from section leading its peer counseling class to being an all-staff coordinator. But her first encounter with the Bridge was when she was a freshman, processing the death of soccer player Katie Meyer who was her next-door neighbor and RA.
“I was really young, and lost, and unable to tell people how I was feeling,” Wenardy said. “I called the Bridge because I really wanted to talk to someone openly — someone I didn’t know, but who would still understand what I was going through.”
Wenardy said that calling the Bridge then, when she was alone in temporary housing, was one of the most important moments in her Stanford experience. Another was becoming a Bridge staffer.
Currently based out of a cozy first-floor apartment in Munger Graduate Housing, the Bridge Peer Counseling Center operates a free, anonymous counseling service 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“The point is not necessarily to fix all of a student’s problems within an hour, but it’s one hour that maybe gets them to have a little bit of a brighter tomorrow, and then that next day is what gets them through the next week, and then the quarter, and the year and so on,” Wenardy said. “That’s the beauty of peer counseling — how one moment can really continue to pay forward.”
On top of being the typical Stanford students with problem sets and midterms, the Bridge “live-ins” — Eric Martz ’25 M.S. ’25, Dante Danelian ’24 M.S. ’25, Emily Huang ’25 and Julia Donlon ’24 M.S. ’25 — each volunteer over 30 hours every week to keep the service running day and night, literally “living in” the Bridge’s Munger community space.
However, the live-ins say that the Office of Student Affairs is holding out on providing a decision on the future location and financial status of the Bridge. On Sunday, the live-ins launched a public petition addressed to Provost Jenny Martinez demanding that the University continue providing funding and a permanent space for the Center and issue a decision for the future of the program.
At Monday’s Graduate Student Council (GSC) meeting, Martinez stated that “there’s no desire to defund or end the Bridge program” and that she hopes to continue supporting “the very valuable work that students in the peer counseling program do,” while suggesting there may be alternate ways to continue the program.
Martz said that, in the first 24 hours since going live, the petition received over 1,000 signatures from students, alumni and family members who are concerned about the Bridge’s future on campus.
The Bridge’s staff of student volunteers, who are trained for over 85 hours in crisis response over the course of two classes, respond to anonymous calls or walk-ins from students at any hour of the day to provide peer support on any topic, from academic to relationship to mental health counseling.
Martz noted that two-thirds of calls to the Bridge occur when no other physical care services are open. Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), the University’s primary mental health service, is physically open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.
CAPS on-call crisis specialists are available by phone 24/7 for any students who call the main CAPS line, 650-723-3785. TimelyCare, which Vaden launched in October 2023 as a supplement to onsite-services, provides 24/7 virtual mental health and medical appointments by video or phone.
The live-ins met with the Vice Provost of Student Affairs, Michele Rasmussen, and the Associate Vice Provost for Inclusion, Community and Integrative Learning, Samuel Santos, on Nov. 20 in hopes of collaborating toward a decisive outcome for the Bridge, according to Donlon. Rasmussen and Santos agreed to work with R&DE to search for a space and were given a deadline by the live-ins for the final decision of Dec. 13.
In a Dec. 16 email to the live-in staff acquired by The Daily, Rasmussen wrote that “while we remain committed to finding a way to support the peer counseling offered by The Bridge,” she did not “anticipate being able to confirm the amount of our support until late January or early February.” University spokesperson Luisa Rapport confirmed in an email to The Daily that “Student Affairs anticipates providing details about the extent of its AY2025-26 support for The Bridge by the beginning of February, once the budget planning process for next year is completed.”
A major reason why the Bridge live-ins emphasized their need for a December decision was to be able to hire new live-ins for next year. With an unstable financial situation and even uncertainty if there will be a live-in space, current live-ins say it is difficult to offer concrete roles to interested staffers, who may instead apply to be Residential Assistants (RAs), for instance.
“Our staffers care deeply about this organization, but I think it’s a hard decision to put up in front of somebody to say, ‘Do you care enough to potentially take out loans to join this organization for another year?’” Danelian said.
Currently, the live-ins pay out-of-pocket for $20,000 of the $80,000 cost of the Center, which is the cost of the four-bedroom Munger apartment it is located in now. Huang said that while the live-ins are there because they “love this so much” to give their own money, it is “just not sustainable” and “gatekeeps” the experience from many students.
Martz said that the “funding problem” was created in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the University moved the Bridge out of Rogers House where the Center had operated for 20 years into Munger Graduate Residences. For the 30 years prior to Rogers House, the Bridge was located in the McCracken Residence Building formerly across from the Haas Center for Public Service until it was demolished in 2001.
At the GSC meeting, Rasmussen clarified that there may have been some miscommunication following her last email in December, and that the delay deciding the budget and location search did not correlate to defunding.
“It’s not just a money issue. It’s also an actual physical location issue,” Rasmussen said. “I think that is adding to the anxiety, because there has been sort of this year to year arrangement that’s made on an interim basis now for a handful of years, and we’re very aware that that is stressful and anxiety-provoking for a program that’s been around for as long as the Bridge.”
Each year for the past five years, live-ins said that they have not only been preoccupied with the tasks of staying on-call 24/7, curating a community space and supporting the Bridge’s 50 staffers, but also “fighting to stay alive just another year,” according to Huang, referring to negotiations with the University to maintain a space and funding.
Martz said that from the moment the next year’s four live-ins are hired in the spring, they have to begin the process to “broker an agreement to last one more year” — to “fight to stay alive.”
Martinez elaborated at the meeting Monday that while the University’s three goals for the Bridge were to support its model, provide financial support and offer a physical location, she questioned if “the exact model that Bridge has been operating under [is] the only way to achieve those three objectives.”
According to Danelian, proposed alternatives for the future of the Bridge included transitioning to an office space with a “place to rest,” operating out of staffers’ own dorm rooms, continuing to pay out of pocket for the community space and “looking elsewhere for funding,”
Huang said any decentralized model of the Bridge would fundamentally alter the Bridge’s purpose and effectiveness, naming “anonymity” and “accessibility” key tenets of counseling.
For some students, the Bridge’s accessible nature is crucial. Trin Nobles ‘27 said that they were in one of the most difficult moments of their life last winter, when they were denied an appointment by CAPS because they had received therapy out-of-state before coming to Stanford, and could not afford other local options.
According to an email from Rapport, “any student, regardless of their previous care history, can access CAPS for consultation and care.” Rapport wrote that once students have connected with a CAPS provider, their provider will work with CAPS to establish a plan to meet ongoing needs.
“It’s so hard because you don’t want to put these burdens on your friends,” Nobles said. “I needed anyone to talk to, and [the Bridge was] the only resource here that would be there for me.”
Nobles went to the Bridge’s in-person space in Munger that day. They said that having a welcoming physical space was “so nice” especially for students who had roommates, for whom a phone call may not be private.
Nobles said that when they went to the Bridge, they felt like there was “no future” for them at Stanford. They said that they felt “stuck” and like they “would never really be able to make it here.”
“Just being able to go [to the Bridge] and be validated, and being told that it’s a normal way to feel here, was really reassuring.” Nobles said that while they still felt like they were having a hard time when they left, they “also felt hopeful.”
Danelian argued that one of the cheapest ways for the University to have a 24/7 counseling service is by having students work for free, taking overnight calls while living where they work.
“The University can’t have its cake and eat it too,” Danelian said. “Truly, the only thing you provide is the space. We’re not asking for a lot. We’re asking for the bare minimum,” he said.
Donlon pointed out that for many years, while the Bridge was still located in the Rogers House, the Center paid for itself via an annual Spring Faire in White Plaza.
The Bridge was founded in 1971 by then-CAPS psychiatrist Vincent D’Andrea as a confidential drug-counseling service for specially-trained students who lived with each other to help their peers. It was named for the Simon and Garfunkel song, “Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” and was among the first 24-hour peer-counseling centers in the country.
To Martz, who is a second-year live-in, the Bridge is most importantly a community, “a microcosm of why I love the Stanford community overall — people care about each other and want to support each other.”
Bridge staffer Will Li ’25 M.S. ’25 took the first Bridge peer counseling class in winter quarter of his freshman year and is now a section leader for the class, four years later. He said the first call he ever took, in his freshman year, was responding to a serious crisis. Having a live-in be able to be there and support him during and after the call was very important — the live-ins, he said, are the “glue” of the organization.
For Li, the Bridge is impactful to campus beyond just its phone service. He called it a “net exporter of kind and empathetic” people.
“I think there’s a lot of folks who are like, ‘Oh, I’ve never called the Bridge, I don’t really know how it’s affected my life,” Li said. “It’s not just that the Bridge counselors counsel people, I think that there’s a lot of people who either take the class or are counselors and then go on to be better friends and better RAs and better SHPRC counselors and better student-leaders on campus.”
Danelian called the past few months of experience as a live-in “equal parts enriching and disheartening.” He said taking overnight calls and being able to help other students who may be “calling in some of the darkest moments of their lives” was “deeply inspiring.”
“But at the same time, it is disappointing to see the administration pinch pennies when it comes to student mental health,” Danelian said. “Because when you live at this center and you are getting a finger on the pulse of how students are feeling, it’s clear that we need to be doing more for students, not taking systems that work and messing with them.”
Wenardy said that the Bridge, both from the perspective of a counselee and counselor, has been transformative to others and her own Stanford experience and changed what she wants to do with her career.
“I didn’t know it’s possible to do something so rewarding, as a student who’s 19, 20, 21 [years old], and to make such a difference on campus,” Wenardy said. “My hope, me and a lot of Stanford students who are leaving, is that we can fight for the Bridge now, so that it can continue to stand for generations.”
Donlon and the other live-ins emphasized that their public campaign was to secure long-term support and funding from the University.
“We are so happy to do this work,” Donlon said. “Because we care. We just want the University to meet us halfway.”
Bhushan Mohanraj contributed reporting.
A previous version of this article misstated that the Bridge had been located in the Rogers House for 50 years. The Bridge was located in the McCracken Residence Building from 1971 to 2001 and in Rogers House from 2001 to 2021. A previous version of this article also stated that the Bridge is the only mental health resource available to students on campus in the evenings and weekends. CAPS is available to any student, regardless of their previous care history. The Daily regrets these errors.