As an organization dedicated to youth development, our work with adults often has two overarching and complementary aims:

• Help the individual adults acquire knowledge and tools that equip them to work with youth in a more supportive and effective way
• Help the organization itself align its practices with the core principles of youth development

Toward those ends, we work with schools and districts, after-school program providers, and a range of youth-serving organizations like YMCAs, Boys & Girls Clubs.

At this point, our focus is primarily on the issues of youth-on-youth mistreatment: cruelty, bullying, and violence.

We provide:

• School Staff Development
• Parent Education
• Community Forums and Summits

School Staff Development
School staff members have a powerful influence on the social-emotional climate of a school, and thus on the level of mistreatment students experience as well as on the overall academic achievement of their students.

To support educators in making this influence as positive as possible, we provide:

Positive School Climate Modules
This is a Training-of-Trainers for a team of influential staff members who are then equipped with skills and resources they can use to lead colleagues through a series of modular workshops that improve the school’s social-emotional climate and reduce bullying and violence. Modules help staff members proactively build positive relationships with peers and students, recognize student-on-student mistreatment and intervene effectively.

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In-Service Training
Half-day to whole-day sessions customized to meet your staff needs for building a positive classroom and school climate. Content includes: identifying forms and costs of mistreatment on YOUR campus, learning valuable strategies for strengthening relationships with students, and gaining new skills for effective intervention in disciplinary incidents. This training helps staff develop a standardized, school-wide approach and vocabulary that integrate your school’s positive climate programs and strategies into one comprehensive plan. For SSA schools, the session could also help staff better understand and support the Safe School Ambassadors program.

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Community Forums and Summits

We provide:
   - Safer Schools Symposium and Youth Forum

A summit brings together key leaders and members of a school, district, community or region to focus on a particular issue. It usually includes some education and information-sharing, some discussion and dialogue, and some decision-making and planning. It also typically includes both youth and adults; if for some reason it is not practical or desirable to include youth in the dialogue about an issue, these summits can be designed and conducted for adults alone.

Summits can be relatively small gatherings of 15-20 people, or they can be larger functions that include 300-500 participants. And, they can be anything in between. They typically require 6-8 hours of time to be effective.

Summits can focus on issues like:

• cruelty, bullying, and violence in schools
• gangs and violence in a community
• alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs

They can be planned in a month by a small group that has efficiency as its goal. Or, they can be planned over 3-8 months by a larger group of youth and adults organized into interconnected committees that has the dual goals of producing the summit AND making the process of planning it a practical life lesson in community organizing & planning, especially for its teens.

If you think it might be helpful to bring people together around an issue of concern in your school or community, contact us to discuss your situation and possible options. For further insight into the summit process, explore one option described at Community Summits.

Parent Education
These programs are designed to help parents:

• understand the nature and scope of the problem of mistreatment, including common terms and examples of what youth experience on a frequent basis
• understand the cost of this mistreatment not just to targets and aggressors, but to bystanders and to society as a whole
• equip their children with strategies they can use when they are the target, the aggressor, or the bystander in peer mistreatment
• be effective advocates for putting youth on the front lines of reducing mistreatment and improving school climate.