LYNN — With May being mental health awareness month, Girls Inc. collaborated with Boston-based ThinkGive to bring Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) to the surface.
Girls Inc. is a nonprofit that follows the mission of inspiring all girls to be strong, smart and bold, while ThinkGive is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering youth to take actions that positively impact themselves and others, building character, confidence and connection.
“ThinkGive is a Social and Emotional Learning program geared at K to 8 (kindergarten to eighth grade). It empowers youth to explore who they are, how they want to be, and how they want to show up in the world,” Executive Director of Girls Inc., Penny Austen, said.
The programs promote key skills focused on self-awareness, social awareness, relationship skills and resilience. Austen explained that it produces outcomes around confidence, connection, character and empowerment.
“The programs are pretty unique in that they’re very action-based and youth-driven. Students have complete agency in choosing the actions they take coming out of lessons,” she said.
Each lesson ends with a “call to action,” where youth have a choice on what action they want to take.
“Youth might choose to take an action like including someone who’s left out or speaking up for a peer,” she said. “These are small things that are well within their capacity to do and don’t take much time, but are very much based on character and choices.”
Austen explained that these small actions can have a large impact and help build character, agency and a positive peer culture.
An important and central part of ThinkGive’s model is equity.
“We raised funds to bring SEL learning to under-resourced youth who might not be getting it in their schools,” Austen said.
This year, ThinkGive worked with 72 partner schools and youth-serving organizations, and “about 82% of those were serving under-resourced youth.” ThinkGive also isn’t the one going into the classrooms. They train the facilitators or educators at schools, afterschool programs, summer programs, etc.
ThinkGive was founded in 2013 when the nonprofit saw a gap where schools lacked a space for students to think about their character and to explore values and identity.
“The programming in place was very adult-driven and adult-defined. It had little impact on the kids,” Austen said. “For example, a food drive. Children would bring in a can of soup but they would never see where that can went. They wouldn’t see any impact of their action.”
She said another reason ThinkGive was founded was due to a societal shift where, for example, kids weren’t sitting with their families to have dinner, and there were more structured activities with kids racing around to get to one activity to the next.
There were fewer opportunities for reflection, thinking about character, and talking about character. It was more screen time, disconnection and isolation happening, which has only accelerated since then,” she said.
Austen also went into detail about the current youth mental health crisis and how the former U.S. Surgeon General warned that youth mental health is at a breaking point, with rising rates of anxiety and depression.
When asked what the barrier is to SEL being provided in more schools and programs, especially with only 39% of under-resourced youth receiving SEL, Austen explained that it centered around funding and staffing.
“Funding and staffing limitations are the number one barrier, especially for under-resourced schools and youth-serving organizations. There are many educators who want to include SEL but they lack the training, the resources, and the time to deliver it well,” she said. “In Massachusetts, if you look at most well-funded schools, you will see SEL in the mix.”
Austen said that in an ideal world she would love to see SEL become a priority in all youth spaces, not just in schools, but in afterschool programs, sports, camps and community settings.
“It should be looked at as a starting point to build academic skills. It should be considered the foundation for all of that because educators cannot effectively teach academic content if students don’t feel safe, seen or connected. If they’re struggling with social and emotional issues, they’re not absorbing other material as well,” she said.
When asked how ThinkGive and Girls Inc. got involved with each other, Austen explained that she had previously known Natalie Martinez, CEO of Boston and Lynn’s Girls Inc., and that they both saw the potential for collaboration.
“They were looking for programming that could support their middle schoolers, and I think that for them it was a natural complement to the existing programs they had,” she said.
Bold Futures Mentoring Coordinator Abbie Ritchie, of Girls Inc., was the one trained to run the ThinkGive program for the organization.
“I also run programming, which is why I ended up running ThinkGive. I wanted to do it because I know there’s a very big lack of Social and Emotional Learning education that our kids are getting both in school and also in their daily lives,” she said.
She continued by saying that she wanted the kids to be more aware of how they are acting toward themselves and one another.
“When I met Hannah (program coordinator and curriculum developer at ThinkGive) and Penny (Austen) from ThinkGive, the overview of the programming that they were giving me sounded like it would be very beneficial for them (the kids),” Ritchie said. “I was just really interested in seeing the changes that it would make for them and how they conducted themselves toward other people, especially the other girls here, because they’re all coming from different backgrounds and different places. They all have differences within them. So, I wanted to see if it would positively benefit how they interacted with one another and I think it definitely did.”
