Nicia Fullwood

“Together, We Grow (TWG) is a year-long, culturally-responsive, healing-centered mindfulness initiative for teenage students, staff, and families of Brooklyn Emerging Leaders Academy (BELA), an all-girls charter high school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, NY. This initiative will be co-designed and co-facilitated in partnership with Lineage Project, a non-profit organization that provides trauma-sensitive, mindfulness programs to young people and staff inside NYC's schools and young people who are involved in/impacted by the court, foster care, shelter, immigration and school suspension systems. This initiative will have the following impact: 1. Participants' social-emotional skills and values will be enhanced through consistent, ongoing access to mindfulness practice spaces designed to support nervous system regulation, self-awareness, skillful decision-making, and deepening inner and collective resilience. 2. Participants will learn simple, portable and concrete strategies to nourish their capacity for wellbeing, inner power, joy, reflection, truth-telling and interconnection. 3. Participants will feel an increased sense of community belonging, support and interconnection; 4. Student co-facilitators will be mentored as leaders and their voices amplified as peer advocates, through the program model and pedagogical approach, which will pair a Lineage teacher with two students to co-design, co-plan, and co-facilitate the sessions. 5. We will produce comprehensive program evaluation in collaboration with our students to help us strengthen the next iteration of this program (we intend to make this a regular school offering moving forward). Clinical neuropsychologist Dr. Anna MacKay Brandt of the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research will help us design our evaluation tools, collect data, and synthesize our findings.”