CARE HARD CURRICULUM PILOT

Inlight Institute helps kids, parents, and educators by providing the tools to teach kids to care. By helping them connect to themselves, others, and a greater purpose, we target social isolation, loneliness, anxiety, and depression. Inlight accomplishes our mission through curriculum, events, activities, and toolkits that promote a positive space and empower kids to work through emotions associated with coming-of-age and personal traumas. We aim to make kids feel valuable and capable of solving problems bigger than themselves and to equip kids with the confidence to undertake anything that comes their way - today and into adulthood.

Our Care Hard system, a hands-on, kid-driven curriculum that centers care through values and service learning, is ready to pilot. Once proven successful, this curriculum has the potential to improve youth mental health and reduce loneliness, anxiety, and depression, thereby decreasing self-harm and violence in school-aged children. This type of programming is an urgent need to address the mental health of children and adolescents, as outlined by the Surgeon General https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-youth-mental-health-advisory.pdf.

We aim to provide innovative learning solutions to enable kids to feel empowered, capable, and able to demonstrate care. Youth require a system to learn the key skills to handle their mental health and gain confidence for adulthood; early intervention is key for preventing emerging symptoms from turning into crises. 

The value and the action of Care, an emotional investment in another’s well-being & taking actions to benefit the other, is our most valuable resource for conflict resolution and is teachable. Inlight has been developing unique, kid-centric programs in the community, using evidence-based methodologies that support the fact that developing social, emotional, and behavioral competencies early in life correlates to healthier children and promotes safer environments.

Inlight Institute’s mission, vision, and goals are in response to and centered upon the staggering mental health statistics in children and youth. Our work aims to make a positive impact on child and youth mental health by partnering with an Advisory Board that includes professionals in child psychiatry, psychology, and education. Research and professional guidance from field experts in children’s mental health, education, ACE (adverse childhood experience), and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) shape all our programming, toolkits, and events for kids as well as the supportive tools we provide parents and educators. 

Inlight’s mission, coupled with the sobering reality of the status of youth mental health, led us to develop our Care Hard Curriculum. This modular, turn-key curriculum can be tailored to children’s developmental stages and needs. All Inlight’s programs follow the evidence that empowering kids to care at an early age builds empathy and compassion which is essential for humans to self-heal. 

Our Care Curriculum is designed to increase emotional capacity and mental resilience with hands-on activities that guide kids through three key concepts as mottos: Care Hard, Got Your Back, and Leave It Better. With each activity, kids are encouraged to express care, exhibit courage, and make a contribution through the lens' of thinking about themselves, others, and the world around them. We will provide core instruction, supplemental practices and challenges, and professional learning to support adult mentors. Different from other service-learning programs, kids are encouraged to seek out problems in their community, brainstorm solutions, design purpose-driven businesses that give back, and track their impact. Our program contains a values-learning component that will guide their decisions on how they want to bring themselves into this process.

Through research and collaboration, we used evidence-based methods and worked with our curriculum designer and Advisory Board who are all field experts in mental health, education, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), to create an innovative kid-centric curriculum ready to be piloted. Our leadership team is ready to implement our curriculum to ensure the children are engaged in the material, while we are gathering the appropriate data to inform further refinement and attainment of anticipated outcomes. We continue to develop our parent and teacher training and evaluation methods. Once our initial pilot curriculum is deemed successful, there is a potential to serve an innumerable number of children, for free, through schools, after-school and community programs, and youth development organizations, where students learn, heal, and feel empowered.