Roughly 25 students. About $20 each. One hour that a lot of them will still be using years from now.
Donation pages usually talk in abstractions, so here is the opposite. Below is exactly what your money buys, minute by minute, as we deliver it.
The SIEL Project is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit. EIN 88-4189654. Your gift is tax-deductible.
Every session opens with the one idea everything else depends on. Connection is a skill, not a personality you are born with. The students that seem naturally good with people mostly just got more practice, earlier, and anyone in the room can close that gap.
There are lonely kids in every classroom, and you can watch this land on them. Most have privately concluded that something is wrong with them. Being told plainly that they are missing practice rather than missing something is the first relief many of them have been offered.
A SIEL workshop is never a lecture and never a workbook. Students learn a small number of concrete tools, how to start a conversation with someone new, how to keep it going with follow-up questions, how to recover from an awkward moment, and then they practice them live, in pairs and small groups.
Participation is always by invitation, so no student is put on the spot in front of the room. The quiet kids get the most careful handling, because they are the reason we exist. By design, every student starts a real conversation before the session ends. For some that is routine. For a few it is the first time in months.
The classroom teacher stays for the entire session. The content is strictly about friendship and belonging, never dating, and for younger students every example stays about classmates in familiar settings. We coordinate with the school counselor in advance, so if a session surfaces a student that needs more help than a workshop can give, we know exactly where to point them.
Something usable at lunch the same day. A way to open a conversation. A way to keep it alive. The knowledge that an awkward moment is survivable, and the beginning of proof that they are not broken, just under-practiced.
Skills compound. An hour that changes how a fourteen-year-old approaches the next thousand lunches is not a small hour.
$500 · one classroom
A full workshop for roughly 25 students, free to a school that could not otherwise pay for it.
$100 · five students
Five young people that get the hour, and get to practice in it.
$20 · one student
The smallest useful unit we have, and a real one. One kid in one room.
$20 a month · a student every month
Monthly giving is the most useful kind for an organization our size, because it lets us commit to a school before the money is in the door. Twelve students a year, for less than most streaming subscriptions.
The young people that need these skills most are usually the least able to pay for them. The kid eating lunch alone, the teenager that has not been invited to anything in months, the young adult that has quietly stopped trying. None of them can book a coach. All of them can sit in a classroom.
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 in this age group is measurably worse than it was a decade ago.
We are small and we are honest about that. Everything we publish is free, the workshops are free to the schools that need them most, and this is the part that somebody else has to pay for.
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 the free guides. Send them to a parent, a teacher, or a young person that could use them. Browse the articles.
Volunteer. We are a small organization and capable hands make a real difference. Get in touch.