Welcome to another academic year!
YHC has selected the topic: “Respecting Self, Respecting Others: Living a Life of Balance and Connection” as our focus theme for the year. Throughout the year we will be exploring how to help children, youth, teens, families, schools and communities address this critically important issue.
Our media is replete with examples and illustrations, some positive others quite negative, regarding respect, differences, balance and connection, and their impact on how we live in community. It is our hope that we can foster open dialog and reach a clear understanding why this matters in the lives of our youth. We know that positive culture and climate in schools and communities are foundational to creating healthy social emotional learning. Social emotional learning guided by positive culture and climate are anchors to emotional development that take us through a life time journey.
We want our youth, schools and communities to embrace the notion that respect for self and others is core to positive emotional understanding, that it allows for us to then work toward living life with balance and connection.
We will be hosting educational programs and speakers through the year who will provide research on this topic and pragmatic strategies for how schools, communities and adults who care, can build a strong united message for our youth. As they navigate their developmental journey we want them to grow and be open, to feel safe, respected and understood, to know the importance of a balanced life, of how connection creates strong relationships.
It is far too easy to allow discourse to be silenced, to allow electronic connection to replace face to face, to sink in to fear of difference rather than holding respect as primary.
Please join us this year as we move forward with true conviction and belief, grounded in evidence, data and research, that respect provides the path for healthy development.
