Executive Director Melanie Goodman speaks with educator Kathy Nimmer in our next conversation for our Working Well podcast series with the National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments (NCSSLE). The aim of these podcasts is to better understand how an investment in educator well-being can improve student success. Kathy was a high school English teacher for 29 years, Indiana’s Teacher of the Year in 2015, and also happens to be blind. Kathy discusses how she defines her disability, the learning curve of her own classroom experience, and her work mentoring new teachers.

Today we’re highlighting the Working Well Resource Directory we recently created with The National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments. The directory includes over 70 carefully curated toolkits, blog posts, journal articles, podcasts and more all addressing how staff well-being and related practices are being implemented to improve conditions for teaching and educators. The directory also includes resources on equity among special populations.

Youth Catalytics’ Training Director Cindy Carraway-Wilson has decades of experience leading professional development trainings in the child and youth care services sector. Today we highlight two of her recent training experiences in Alaska and Kentucky which happily included in-person sessions, and welcomed dozens of newly certified professionals to the field.

Today we highlight the second interview in our Working Well podcast series with the National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments (NCSSLE). The aim of the podcasts is to better understand how an investment in educator well-being can improve student success. Youth Catalytics’ Melanie Goodman speaks with Dr. Georgeanne Warnock, the Superintendent of Terrell Independent School District, in Terrell, Texas, who has twenty-five years of experience in public education. She talks about managing staff recruitment and retention, being an advocate for public schools, the social emotional health of students and staff, and gives an update on the remarkable student and staff gains they’ve seen since changing to a four day school week.

A concerted investment in staff well-being can only help to ensure the health of the educational system and its workforce. Given that, we produced the Working Well podcast series with the National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments, the first of which we’re featuring here. In this episode Melanie Goodman speaks with Jermar Rountree, the 2023 D.C. Teacher of the Year and a Pre-K through 8th grade health and physical education teacher at a Title I school. He talks about the social emotional learning activities he incorporates into his teaching, the importance of sharing feelings, supporting colleagues in health and wellness, having autonomy in the classroom, and what sustains his passion for teaching. Learn more and listen.

It’s been three months since we published The Foresight Initiative—our pandemic response aimed at encouraging forward-thinking practice, amplifying young voices, and highlighting experimentation. In our view, a greater appreciation for the lived experience and contributions of youth, as well as an increased emphasis on professional collaboration and wellbeing, have been the biggest wins to come out of the period of pandemic loss. We looked back at our Foresight takeaways and asked leaders across the child and youth services sector for their responses. We present a sampling of what they told us here.

Our newest podcast in our Insights from the Field series is a conversation with Dr. Kim Frierson (she/her), DSW, CYC-P, Youth Catalytics training specialist and Assistant Professor at Spaulding University in Louisville, Kentucky. Dr. Frierson is an expert on diversity, equity, and inclusion and self and community care. She spoke with us about the challenges of working through the pandemic, the difference between charity models and rights-based models in non-profit work, the importance of youth voice and seeing and treating youth as colleagues and experts, allyship, and more.

Pandemic trauma, online school, racial injustice, political discontent—today’s youth and the systems around them are changing. In 2021, we launched The Foresight Initiative to discover what new perspectives and innovations would shape the future. We surveyed and interviewed experts, reviewed the literature, and held conversations with young people. Two years later, some of the biggest wins during this period of loss are a greater appreciation for lived experience, professional collaboration, and everyone’s wellbeing. From the start, we aimed to showcase experimentation, project young voices, and inspire forward-thinking practice; see the results here.

This is the second in our series, Back to (social) work, with our colleague Melanie Wilson. She discusses the successes and challenges of developing a mentoring and tutoring program in partnership with a local school system in Washington State.

New mentoring and tutoring programs are emerging to support students and schools following the pandemic. This is the first in a series, where our colleague Melanie Wilson traces the evolution of a hybrid startup program her nonprofit developed in partnership with a local school system in Washington State. Updates will appear every month or two.

Youth Catalytics thrives on meeting new challenges and opportunities to foster our growth and evolution. We’re proud to announce our now formal partnership with the National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments (NCSSLE), whose mission is to improve conditions for learning in schools and sustain safe, engaging, and healthy school environments that support student academic success. In recognition of January’s Human Trafficking Month, we are sharing some of the training opportunities and publications we have created with NCSSLE to address the growing problem of child and youth trafficking in the U.S. and the important efforts underway to prevent, intervene, and educate about the issue to schools and communities.

Today we’re highlighting an innovative community building project we completed in Addison County, Vermont in 2022. Leaders from their arts community, clean energy sector, town centers, workforce development, affordable housing, family services, mental health care, and food access programs were developing new, resourceful solutions to longstanding problems to meet their collective needs. Coordinated by the local United Way, Reimagine Addison County led to a series of impactful video and written interviews. See how one community is reimagining its way to sustained, creative collaborative action to boost the community’s economy, culture, and social safety framework.

Our newest podcast for the Foresight Initiative is a multifaceted conversation with Mishaela Durán the new President and CEO of The Forum for Youth Investment. The Forum works to advance equitable youth opportunities and outcomes through quality capacity-building and policy action across systems and sectors–so all young people reach their fullest potential–in education, work, and life. Mishaela spoke with us about the motivation behind her decades of experience in the youth development field including her lived experience in foster care, early career in juvenile justice, how she saw government entities and programs pivot and innovate during the pandemic, her sustained commitment to young people, and more.

Our latest Foresight Initiative podcast is a nuanced conversation with Dr. David Osher, Vice President and Institute Fellow at American Institutes for Research. Dr. Osher’s work focuses on school climate and the social and emotional conditions for learning, supportive and community-building approaches to school discipline and safety, cultural competence and responsiveness, implementation science, and the science of learning and development. He spoke about his enduring commitment to evidence, how we must work together to create the conditions for collective thriving, the significance of unfiltered youth voice, humility and inquisitiveness as heightened competencies, and more.

Our latest conversation for the Foresight Initiative is an interview with Beth Birnstihl, PhD, Mission to Market Director, for the National 4-H Council. 4-H is the largest youth development organization in the U.S., providing mentoring and research-based programming to nearly six million young people. Beth talked with us about the strengths and innovations she saw in young people and throughout the entire Cooperative Extension 4-H system over the past few years.

In this podcast for the Foresight Initiative, we share our conversation with Dr. Gislaine N. Ngounou, Interim President and CEO of the Nellie Mae Education Foundation. The foundation’s primary mission is to champion community-driven efforts that challenge racial inequities and advance excellent, student-centered public education for youth throughout New England. Dr. Ngounou touched on her personal beliefs about philanthropy, described the challenges that NMEF and other foundations faced during the pandemic, the centrality of youth voice and partnerships, how our expectations about impact and change can be fundamentally refined, and more.

Our latest interview for our Foresight Initiative is with Sixto Cancel, the founder and CEO of Think of Us and the Center for Lived Experience. He grew up in, and aged out of the child welfare system and now works to transform foster care and child welfare on a national level. Sixto spoke with us about his organizations’ experiences during the pandemic, his goals for the future of foster care, and the importance of lived experience.

Today we feature a podcast interview for our Foresight Initiative with Claire Wyneken, President and CEO of Wyman Center, a 100-year old youth development organization that provides support and programming to youth in St. Louis and around the country. Claire talked with us about how youth today believe that the people running the country are not looking out for them, and what Wyman is doing in response, by focusing more on young people’s well-being, deepening and expanding partnerships in the community, and inviting young people to become official stakeholders in the organization.

Today we feature an interview with Bridget Alexander, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Waking the Village, which provides housing and support to Sacramento’s homeless community, parenting youth, and their children. In these Foresight Initiative conversations we are learning how experts in the field of child and youth services faced pandemic challenges, innovated and adapted their services in response, what they learned from the experience, and what changed and will stay changed.

Friendly reminder! There’s still time to support today’s young people! We have established a Foresight Honorarium Fund for those participating in focused conversations with us about their experiences over the last two pandemic years; what did and didn’t work for them, and what recommendations they have for the field. Help us honor their lived experience and collaboration with your contribution.