How to Scale Authentically: The Upstream Fellowship
Before COVID-19, the National Education Association labeled the rate of student anxiety as an epidemic. And yet, on average, teachers receive almost no mental health training, and the average student-to-counselor ratio is 455-to-1. Teachers, who are the first responders to student stress and anxiety, are simply not equipped to help. They, too, are also experiencing unprecedented levels of stress. Nearly three quarters of teachers and 84% of school leaders describe themselves as stressed. With the onset of COVID-19, we face an even greater mental health crisis amongst young people.
We recently interviewed a 10th grader in Denver, and she described her peers’ mental health as “at an all-time low.” The Center for Disease Control and Prevention have reported that the proportion of mental-health-related visits among all visits to emergency rooms by children 5 to 17 years old increased significantly from April to October in 2020, compared with those months in 2019.
As an organization, we believe we’re best equipped to meet this moment of great need and get the tools into the hands of educators who can help themselves and their students navigate this unprecedented time.
Ultimately, our goal is to reach 50,000 more students and 1,000 more educators in the next two years. The most equitable, authentic, and sustainable way to do that is through our fellowship model. We launched our inaugural Mental Health Changemakers fellowship at the start of 2020-21 school year with the support of the Colorado Health Foundation. We catalyzed this fellowship based on what we’ve learned over the years: individual educators committed to this work were best positioned to scale the Upstream program within a school. Within this framework, Upstream sees educators as partners and gives them autonomy to adapt the program to meet their students’ needs. This fosters a bottom-up approach, instead of a top-down approach, because it creates authentic, distributed leadership. In doing so, this approach emphasizes learning and allows us to tackle equity challenges in social emotional learning and mental health collectively.
To reach our impact goal, we believe that these components provide the right recipe to meaningfully and authentically create change:
Coalesce a cohort of 50 educators across the country who self-select and apply to the fellowship.
Train and equip fellows with Upstream’s stress-reducing, resilience-building tools.
Support fellows as they use the Upstream tools with their students during the school year.
Foster an environment where fellows are able to cross-pollinate ideas and innovate in order to help them uniquely meet the needs of their students.
Receive ongoing professional development from leading experts in the field, such as Dr. Brooke Stafford-Brizard, Vice President of Research Practice at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, through hour-long monthly coaching calls.
Collaborate with a research partner to understand how effective the fellows’ implementation is and learn what they can do to improve it.
Offer free optional wellness sessions in Breathwork with our dear friend, George Ramsay, and yoga and meditation with our Program Advisory Board member, Brittany Simone Anderson.
Offer a $500 stipend for the fellows’ time and lifetime curricular access.
Provide the opportunity to scale the program school-wide at no cost for the following school year.
Anyone who works in secondary education in the United States and directly works with students can apply! In our fellowship, we have school social workers, classroom teachers, principals, SEL specialists, counselors, and school psychologists. This diversity of roles facilitates greater cross-pollination of different ideas and fosters even more creativity and innovation in how the tools are used with students.
