The most concrete gift in youth mental health.
Picture a ninth grader that eats lunch alone. Not because anything is wrong with him, but because nobody ever taught him how to join a table, and every day that passes makes the gap feel more permanent. There is one of him in nearly every classroom in the country. Your gift is for him.
About $500 funds one complete, hands-on social skills workshop for a classroom of roughly 25 students, delivered free to a school that could not otherwise pay for it. That works out to about $20 per student. $100 covers five kids. Every gift, at any size, goes toward the same thing: putting these skills in front of young people at no cost to them.
A SIEL workshop is never a lecture and never a workbook. Students learn a small number of concrete skills, how to start a conversation, how to keep one going, how to recover from an awkward moment, and then they practice them, live, in the room. Every single student starts a real conversation before the session ends. The classroom teacher stays in the room the whole time. Kids leave with something they can use at lunch that same day, and the quiet ones leave with proof that they can do this.
Social skills shape almost everything about a young person's life: friendships, mental health, school, and eventually work. And the students that need this help most are often in the schools and families least able to pay for it. For this reason, everything The SIEL Project makes is free to the young people that use it. Our guides are free. Workshops are free to schools that cannot afford them. Donations are the entire reason that model works.
Gifts fund three things: delivering workshops to schools at no charge, keeping both of our free guides free and current, and reaching more classrooms. We are a small organization that runs lean on purpose, and we would rather show you the work than talk about overhead.
One-time or monthly. The SIEL Project is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, EIN 88-4189654. Donations are tax-deductible as allowed by law.
We will make the honest case. Loneliness among young people is a declared public health problem, and the interventions with the best evidence behind them are exactly this: teaching the skills of connection directly. This is prevention, it is cheap, and you can picture precisely what your money bought: one classroom, one hour, 25 kids that each walked out having done the thing they were afraid of. Few gifts are that legible.