We teach teens and young adults the skills to make friends. Having even one good friend helps with loneliness, and it helps with bullying too.
The SIEL Project is a small nonprofit in San Diego. We never charge young people or their families for anything we make, so donations are what keep this work going.
The SIEL Project is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit. EIN 88-4189654. Your gift is tax-deductible.
We use every gift where it will do the most good for young people. Right now, that means free workshops for schools, free articles for students and parents, and the basic costs of running a registered charity.
Students learn a few concrete skills, like how to start a conversation with someone new and how to keep it going, then practice them in pairs with a coach in the room. About $500 covers a full workshop for a class of roughly 25 students. We are ready to start bringing these workshops into schools, free to the ones that could not otherwise afford them. See what happens in a workshop.
We publish practical guides for students and parents on how to start a conversation, how to make friends, what to do if you are being bullied, and what to do if your child is. They are free to anyone, and they are read in both the US and the Philippines. Browse the articles.
Like any registered charity, we have basic costs, such as this website and the yearly filings that keep us in good standing.
Monthly gifts help us most, because they let us plan ahead and say yes to a school sooner.
The young people who need these skills most are usually the least able to pay for them: the student eating lunch alone, the teenager who has not been invited to anything in months, the young adult who has stopped trying. None of them can book a coach. All of them can sit in a classroom or read an article.
Friendship also helps with bullying. In the CDC's national survey, about one in five US high school students said they had been bullied at school in the past year. A well-known study of bullying found that children who had a best friend were protected from bullying getting worse over time. So helping a young person make one good friend does something about bullying as well as loneliness.
Bullying is even more common in the Philippines. In the 2022 PISA survey of 15-year-olds, about three in four Filipino students said they had been bullied at least once in the past year, the highest rate of any country in the survey. That is why some of our articles are written for students and families there.
Social skills sit in an awkward gap. They are not clinical enough to be funded as mental health care, and not academic enough to be funded as education. So they mostly do not get funded at all, even though loneliness among young people is measurably worse than it was a decade ago.
If money is not the right fit right now, these matter too.
Bring SIEL to a school. If you are a teacher, administrator or parent, an introduction is worth more to us than a donation. See what a workshop involves.
Share what we publish. Send an article to a parent, a teacher or a young person who could use it, including our guides on what to do about bullying. Browse the articles.
Volunteer. We are a small organization and capable hands make a real difference. Get in touch.
The SIEL Project holds a Gold Seal of Transparency on Candid, where you can see our filings, programs and compliance status in full.