Youth-Led Transformation

Many students came to us having studied leadership, but few had been given the opportunity to apply their skills and actually serve in this capacity within their own communities. Agency is both one’s capacity and skills to make purposeful choices within a particular context, as well as the inner power that comes from one’s positive sense of self. These qualities can be cultivated through a contemplative exploration of one’s own inner resources, and a building of confidence through experiential leadership and learning opportunities. Offering practical social entrepreneurship skills and the resources to design their ideas, creating avenues to prototype and experiment, and offering a safe container in which to process and learn with curiosity about their experiences (including “failure”) can help build agency, courage, and a willingness to try again. This will drive young change agents to continue to work towards positive change for themselves and others.

Several studies have demonstrated that individuals who act on internal motivation rather than external incentives find more meaning in their experience and are more likely to succeed in any such endeavor. A study of 11,300 West Point cadets showed that those motivated primarily by external motives, such as a desire to get a leadership position after school, performed worse than those who were internally motivated, such as wanting to be trained as a leader or wanting to serve their country. In another experiment, college students were asked to work on a puzzle, and half of them were paid. Those paid stopped working on it immediately after the experiment had ended, while those unpaid continued working on it and reported feeling more enjoyment in their experience.

To participate in our program and implement a social change program as an unpaid volunteer, our young women would give up six to seven months of potential paid employment that would have helped them save towards their college expenses, and often at the protest of their parents. Though the $500 scholarship we provided to those who graduated was roughly equivalent to what they would have earned throughout this time, it was not communicated up front and thus did not serve as an external motivation for participating in the program.

Not only does a student-led initiative offer a path for personal transformation and social impact on the girls within their community, but it also contributes to changing adult perceptions about the value of girls, including among parents, teachers and local leaders. This catalyzes adult commitments to girls’ education and leadership opportunities. In Global Grassroots programs in East Africa, change agents had to engage with adults in registering their organizations as local NGOs and building partnerships for the implementation of their programs. For many, the grant from our international NGO was their first experience managing significant resources, allowing them to demonstrate their accountability and commitment in giving back to their own community. With the majority of our girls’ ventures, the impact was so positively received, local officials, school administrators and teachers would ask for an expansion of the program and then later commit to continuing the intervention after the venture leader completed our program and began her university education. Embedding a youth’s intervention in their own local community is essential for building agency within the student and transforming the community’s perceptions and acts of support towards youth.

We find essential to leadership, the following capacities that involve deeper inner work:

• Attunement to the needs of others, including use of skills that empower and support the self-sufficiency and agency of others. Teach students how to listen deeply and collaborate with others. Help them learn the use of inquiry to engender respect and enable the empowerment of others. The more youth become effective facilitators themselves, the more they advance transformation without imposing themselves in ways that are disempowering.

• Understanding one’s own assets, passions, capabilities and gifts that can be leveraged to contribute meaningfully to the common good with a sense of inner-driven purpose. Help change agents know how to identify their own inner and external assets and to recognize the same in others. This fosters a respect for diversity, skills for creative collaboration and problem-solving, and a recognition that we each have something valuable to contribute to the whole. This also contributes to a deeper sense of meaning and value in each change agent and those she serves.

• Understanding change from personal experience, and how to support transformation in others through understanding, compassion and collaboration. Help students learn about change from the inside out. Through their own experiences with change, they can learn why we always grasp at change yet have such difficulty adapting. Help them look at all challenges and failures as opportunities to learn, iterate and evaluate. Foster the creative mindset of a social entrepreneur in looking for patterns, gaps and prototyping solutions, while building the relationship skills of a mindfulness practitioner. Develop a greater understanding of what drives resistance and how to work from a participatory approach that fosters greater levels of buy-in, ownership, engagement and ultimately transformation that ensures change is sustainable, inclusive and responsive over time.

on Kabbat-Zinn has offered one of the most well-recognized definitions of mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.” There is substantial research that shows a range of physiological and psychological benefits of practicing mindfulness. A 2011 meta-analysis of psychotherapeutic research found evidence to support all of the following benefits of mindfulness:

External Engagement:

• Enhanced present-moment integration

• Improved ability to express one’s self

• Decreased emotional reactivity

• Ability to manage conflict with less anger

• Increased response flexibility

• Ability to disengage automatic pathways

• Ability to manage conflict with less anger

Internal Experience:

• Increased immune functioning

• Increased positive emotions

• Decreased rumination and anxiety

• Decreased depression and stress

• Enhanced awareness, memory and attention

• Increased emotional regulation

A meta study of 24 mindfulness-based interventions involving 1348 students found that mindfulness training increases the “cognitive capacity of attending and learning” with positive impacts to stress and resiliency, rendering students more capable of maximizing their education. Mindfulness allows us to understand ourselves and others, attend to needs responsively, creatively and compassionately, respond wisely in each moment, be guided by our own unique wisdom and purpose, learn from the circumstances around us and lead change for the benefit of others from the inside out.

Conscious Social Change presents a range of mindfulness practices to develop the ability to survey emotions, thought-patterns, and physical needs while simultaneously being aware of the present-moment external environment. We model and encourage participants to develop a daily mindfulness practice using whatever techniques they have found most effective in quieting the mind, cultivating present-moment awareness and inviting relaxation. This is not only critical to social change, but learning in general.

Read more about how we use mindfulness as a design tool and why mindfulness matters for social change.

Empathy, loving-kindness and compassion are also critical to effective leadership. Empathy is the capacity to feel what another is feeling, but compassion is the desire to alleviate the suffering that you witness in another. It is the driver of altruistic action or response that comes from empathetic connection. At the root of compassion and empathy are self-awareness and the awareness of our emotions and those of others. Further, it has been demonstrated time and time again in research studies over the last 20 years that practicing mindfulness helps to increase empathy and compassion for others as well as self-compassion, which reduces stress and negative emotion and increases positive emotion and altruistic responses. One study demonstrated that non-judgmental acceptance results in more helping behavior, but those who also practiced present moment awareness also felt more positive emotion connected to that helping behavior. Another study showed that with only 30 minutes of compassion meditation training per day for two weeks, altruistic behavior increased and neural changes were detected in the circuitry associated with more empathic concern, compassion and response to suffering Loving-kindness, a cultivated state of feeling kindness, warmth, and goodwill towards others can increase positive emotions, reduce stress, promote resilience, and increase empathy, emotional intelligence, and pro-social behavior. In less than ten minutes, loving-kindness meditation can improve feelings of social connection and, when practiced over time, can sustain such experiences months after initial training.

The Conscious Social Change curriculum incorporates a variety of contemplative practices, including breath-based focused attention meditation, walking meditation, mindfulness of emotions, body and thoughts, compassion meditation, loving-kindness meditation, affirmations, yogic questioning methods, balanced awareness of self and other, mindfulness and breathing to avoid emotional reactivity, journaling, and other practices to cultivate the many benefits of mindfulness and to develop more self-aware, satisfied and compassionate leaders.

Finding meaning is defined by the ability to integrate and make sense of one’s experience. Integration is an indicator of emotional intelligence. In Dan Siegel’s book, The Whole Brain Child, he explains that integration allows for linkages between diverse parts of the brain so that they operate together as a whole, rewiring and forming neural connections to allow these parts to work more harmoniously together over time. As our brains are not fully developed until we are 25, this is still deeply relevant for young brains. Integration allows youth a greater capability for learning from their experiences (higher brain functioning) rather than simply reacting to them (lower brain functioning), which helps foster meaning, empathy, compassion, connection and responsible decision-making. This is critical to a social change leader in their ability to advance long-term transformation. We have to be able to understand the drivers of change from our own experiences wanting change or struggling with adapting to change. When we find meaning and understanding through integration, we uncover a sense of greater understanding and connection with others. This means we are more likely to work collaboratively towards solutions-building rather than using the conventional paradigm of sticks and carrots to force short-term compliance on others. We also know finding meaning through integration is critical for wellbeing, resilience and happiness. This is why Global Grassroots actively worked to support the capacity of our students to understand their experiences through contemplation and dialogue, to distill and find meaning, and to cultivate compassion and empathy through deep listening exercises, conflict resolution techniques, personal transformation exercises, journaling, contemplative practices and other forms of self-discovery.

Social-emotional learning are educational interventions that support an increase in self-awareness and pro-social behavior. A 2011 meta-analysis of educational programs that incorporate social-emotional learning revealed remarkable impact on youth academic performance, classroom behavior, decision-making, maturity, emotional stability, and motivation to learn. The Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) has identified five pillars of social emotional learning, all of which Global Grassroots has worked to foster through our holistic and experiential program:

• Self-awareness: The ability to accurately recognize one’s emotions and thoughts and their influence on behavior. This includes accurately assessing one’s strengths and limitations and possessing a well-grounded sense of confidence and optimism. Global Grassroots has worked to support each of our students in developing the capacity to recognize their emotions, and then go even further to understand what underlies their emotions, including emotional reactivity, fears, limiting beliefs, attachments, shadows, and compulsive behavior. We worked through mindfulness and personal transformation practices to attend to these wounds so that they do not drive unconscious behaviors.

• Self-management: The ability to regulate one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors effectively in different situations. This includes managing stress, controlling impulses, motivating oneself, and setting and working toward achieving personal and academic goals.

Global Grassroots took self-management one step further by supporting our participants in understanding how they typically respond to stress and learning proactive mind-body tools to promote stress management, trauma-healing and wellbeing. In addition to reducing stress and improving happiness, hopefulness and perception of wellbeing, this included developing the ability to recognize negative coping behaviors and engaging in positive methods of self-care, including adopting a self-care plan for proactive stress management. As such, we taught our students an evidence-based model for trauma-healing called Breath-Body-Mind or BBM. By combining modern scientific knowledge with ancient healing practices from many cultures, BBM rapidly relieves stress, anxiety, sleep problems, and other symptoms of stress. Click here to read more about our trauma-informed approach and mind-body trauma-healing practices.

• Social awareness: The ability to take the perspective of and empathize with others; recognizing and appreciating individual and group similarities and differences; recognizing and using family, school, and community resources. This includes prosocial behavior, empathy and gratitude.

Our program directly contributed towards social awareness through not only engagement in mindfulness behaviors that enhance the neural networks underlying empathy, compassion, loving-kindness and altruistic behavior, but also through the opportunity to voluntarily create a community service endeavor to help other young people in their community.

• Relationship skills: The ability to establish and maintain healthy and rewarding relationships with diverse individuals and groups. This includes communicating clearly, listening actively, cooperating, resisting inappropriate social pressure, negotiating conflict constructively, and seeking and offering help when needed.

We also facilitated our participants in learning skills that contribute to healthy relationships, including conscious conflict resolution methods and role play, deep listening skills, learning how to recognize when oneself and another are reactive so as to use mindfulness to inspire curiosity, self-care and compassion, how recognize the unique wisdom and assets of every individual, effective collaboration with other stakeholders, and mentorship.

• Responsible decision making: The ability to make constructive and respectful choices about personal behavior and social interactions based on consideration of ethical standards, safety concerns, social norms, the realistic evaluation of consequences of various actions, and contributing to the well-being of self and community.

Our entire curriculum was geared towards logical and respectful decision-making. We began by training leaders in mindfulness and the capacity to understand how change affects the self and others, so that decisions can be made from a place of compassion and empathy as well as human understanding. We provided students with training in how to deconstruct a problem, analyze its parts and also evaluate it systemically, then build the optimal solution creatively by leveraging all of the assets available among stakeholders without attachment to one’s own agenda. We used logic games, frameworks for problem-solving, creative expression, change theory, analytical exercises, case studies, simulations, role play and ethics frameworks to support an integrated, inner-driven and mindful approach to decision-making.