An opportunity to uplift wonderfully the lives of American kids
Our work has helped some millions of children gain the crucial personal life skills and emotional intelligence needed to flourish in school and in their adult lives. It helps a generation rise above the serious challenges and traumas of current child and youth life and go on to raise the quality of society’s future: a better economy with lower personal and societal pains and costs.
Every donation (including of services) helps us drive parent and educator support for this learning. From that has come a huge rate of return per dollar donated in significant government and school board funding.
SEE BELOW TO DONATE BY CHECK
TO DONATE SERVICES EMAIL CONTACT@EQUIPOURKIDS.ORG
Donating by check?
Please make tax-deductible checks payable to and mail to
Earthways / EQuip Our Kids!
20178 Rockport Way
Malibu, CA. 90265
Earthways tax-exempt number is 95-4021351.
Especially for parents.
As a parent it’s natural to identify and seek to overcome any disadvantages your children are experiencing.
Emotional and social skills, research shows, are crucial difference makers for raising school performance and diminishing negative mindsets and behaviors. They allow children, individually and together, to deal confidently and successfully with schools and life challenges and with disadvantaging or trauma-causing realities that have raised youth suicides, anxiety and depression rates to record levels.
One way to be an awesome parent is to be sure your children and those they grow up with are taught the life skills that optimize mental and emotional health and create healthy relationships and a range of winning advantages.
They then can manifest happy, successful lives together despite familiar-to-parents serious stressors in current youth life, including tremendous pressures to succeed. Add online shaming and bullying, digital addiction, school shootings and survival drills – plus high levels of substance and alcohol abuse starting in early teens.
Along with national child psychiatry and school counseling associations, we advocate for all PreK-12 education to embrace Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculum because it is both a crisis healer and preventative.
What we do to help make an amazing difference.
The world is way too full of drama, violence, crime, poverty and of course disturbed relationships. We decided to support SEL as an enormous opportunity to minimise that outcome and create the kind of world almost all of us say we want but are not sure how to develop.
We concluded that kids learning early in life how to get along with others superbly and how to manage their lives most rewardingly was clearly a provable way there. – as decades of research have shown.
OUR ACTIONS
* We successfully drive demand for and action on implementing Social-Emotional life skills nationwide in PreK-12 schools – and for school district funding for it. Our important services include creating advocacy media, advertising and public diplomacy we conduct to parents, students, the general population, and to key sector leaders and influencers.
* We also provide free media production and PR services to 27 state SEL-supporting grassroots organizations with which we collaborate and thus help their many thousands of educator members promote SEL in their own school districts and throughout their states. And we provide free training and marketing materials to a total of 35 organizations in how to develop business support for the education.
* In particular, we played a significant role in raising parent awareness and support of SEL from 5% eight years ago to 75% Your donation helps attain our goal of ensuring this learning is comprehensively available in every U.S. PreK-12 school by 2030.
* To help parents provide this learning in their homes, we created a free video streaming service that looks like your fave streaming services, with child age categories. We also curated our free Parent and Children Emotional Health Toolkit
* Adding to our grassroots support, we founded the California SEL Alliance, now with 5,000 educator members making a difference getting SEL learning into state schools. We help seed other such alliances in states that lack them.
A BIG REASON TO CONSIDER A CONTRIBUTION
It is worth repeating, because it is so crucial for all of us to understand, that almost all human suffering and conflict, personal and collective, derives from lack of those SEL skills and mindset.
Therefore, the most important learning for every child – and humanity as a whole – is how to get along with each other beautifully and manage our lives most rewardingly. SEL proves the case in long term studies of its effects when taught comprehensively.
About our founders.
EQuip Our Kids! was started by four business leaders with a history of philanthropy targeted at youth development and who support SEL for its remarkable benefits to children, schools, economic development and community uplift. They are Jay Levin, founder of the LA Weekly; Richard Foos, founder of Rhino Records; Dr. Roslyn Blake, CEO of M.B. Ellison, Inc.; and Erik Oberholtzer, founder of Tender Greens Restaurants.
None of the founders or current strategic board members have investments in SEL education programs.
We do not create nor sell our own EQ or SEL learning tools and programs – a great number of small businesses and nonprofits independent of us do. These organizations largely operate without a significant capacity to inform and engage parents and the public. Our pro bono work supports their and SEL educators’ need for public awareness and grassroots support.
The EQuip Our Kids! campaign is a nonprofit project of Earthways Foundation, a 501c3 non-profit organization which has been supporting good causes since 1986. Donations made via this site or our social media pages are coded to go solely to the EQuip Our Kids! campaign.