Author: Mollie Ames

Can Colleges Produce Better People?  

Posted on by Mollie Ames

In their book, “The Real World of College,” Harvard Graduate School of Education researchers Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner discovered something concerning about how today’s students view the world. After interviews with over a thousand students at 10 diverse campuses, they found that students had said the word “I” eleven times as frequently as they said “we.”  The researchers took that to mean that students had a preoccupation with themselves and less of an interest in, well, “us.”  

“As a result of that research, we became very concerned that students were so focused on themselves — their grades, their resumes, their getting that first job — they had little interest or time to think about any campus problems, local challenges, or world-wide issues,” Fischman said.  

While there are many in higher education, indeed in the country, who share that concern, Fischman and Gardner are exploring how college experiences might address it. Their new research initiative is aimed at understanding what it takes to broaden students’ perspective so they might consider how their actions influence those “beyond the self” — from the student down the hall to the wider world.  

All of this work is part of Project Zero, a research center at Harvard dedicated to understanding and nurturing human potentials, such as learning, thinking, ethics, intelligence, and creativity. Characterized as a study of “character education,” this latest research involves rigorous interviews with students and alumni from schools that make character a priority, particularly through efforts that encourage caring for others. These may span strong missions and first-year seminars to service-learning capstones and reflective courses. Fischman and Gardner’s goal is to understand if any are having an impact — both for students over the course of college and for alums beyond college — in moving the needle from “I” to “we.” 

Fischman believes the research fills both a need and a void. “There are a lot of resources and efforts ostensibly focused on character education, but we don’t know what actually works, what endures over time,” she said. “What we are trying to do is to understand what students and alums take away from these messages, initiatives, and missions, so we can begin to understand which are most effective. More importantly, with empirical data, we may be able to show that higher education makes a difference in how individuals think about, act toward, and possibly make a difference in the lives of others.”

Evaluating how well colleges produce good citizens might seems like an “off-trend” effort in a world seemingly obsessed with financial and employment metrics. But given that this easier-to-get hard data has dominated the debate over the value of a college degree, the researchers believe that providing strong evidence of higher education’s more enduring outcomes, including awareness of and empathy for others, is more important than ever.  Without this pursuit, Gardner asks, “What is the point?” 

“If universities and colleges simply have as their goal helping students to get jobs, they will either become vocational institutions or will cede their whole raison d’etre to the private sector, which can train more quickly and less expensively,” Gardner said. “Institutions of higher education should have a broader goal. And especially in the U.S. at the present time, helping others in the community and in the broader society as well as helping oneself would seem highly desirable on all counts.”

Beyond the Self

The Harvard team’s “I” to “we” work is closely aligned with another related finding reported in “The Real World of College.” In their analysis, Fischman and Gardner discerned mental models among students that included a transactional view of college (do what is required to get the degree) and a transformational view of college (question and reflect about one’s own values and beliefs with the possibility and aspiration of being changed, hopefully in constructive ways.)

The researchers identified a measure called HEDCAP (Higher Education Capital), defined as intellectual capacities that students gain as a result of going to college — skills they use to analyze, reflect, connect, and communicate about issues, ideas, and perspectives. For many like Fischman and Gardner, HEDCAP is the ultimate metric on which to gauge the value of a college degree, but currently, it is very difficult to demonstrate. 

“With empirical data, we may be able to show that higher education makes a difference in how individuals think about, act toward, and possibly make a difference in the lives of others.”

Shortly after the release of “The Real World of College,” Fischman, Gardner, and their team embarked on a project called “Beyond the Self,” aimed at understanding how a more transformational college experience, involving engagement with community, might move the “I” to “we” student needle. With 150 students on three different college campuses, they piloted the program aimed at “nudging” students to become more sensitive to campus problems and ethical dilemmas, recognizing that their responses, behaviors, and actions meant something. 

The students were asked to keep portfolios of different dilemmas and problems they had heard about, learned about, read about, or observed and to document their thinking about them through writing, illustrations, or news clippings about them. The researchers talked with the students four times a year about their reflections and were pleased with the results they gathered after the first year.

“We were able to demonstrate that this approach made a difference. We were able to move students from just thinking about themselves to also thinking about others,” Fischman said. 

With evidence of their intervention, Fischman, Gardner, and their team were poised to implement the program at other schools, but a number of factors led them to change course. There were already a myriad of character-based programs and messages in schools throughout the country. Adding another, albeit a promising  one, seemed redundant. Instead, the team focused on what was missing: a larger assessment effort that could show the efficacy, or lack thereof, of these efforts.  

“When we began to ask people how they knew their programs and missions were working, we’d be met with blank stares,” Fischman said. “To our knowledge no one was evaluating or assessing the longer-term impact of efforts that focused on helping student think beyond themselves.” 

With continuous support from the Kern Family Foundation, the team’s new research initiative aims to examine character programs that have a specific outward perspective, not just those that develop individual dispositions such as humility, intellectual curiosity, or honesty, though there is a fair amount of overlap. The researchers are now working with about 30 schools — some with a religious orientation, some with strong public service programs, most with a well-defined mission about doing good in the world.  

The launch-pad question is always the same: For those institutions that make character and ethics a priority, what is the value-add? This exploration leads into three follow-up questions: “Does an institution’s mission, programs, and/or courses on character, ethics, and leadership deepen students’ and alums’ understanding of their role as workers and citizens? Do these initiatives shape students’ perspectives and development over the course of college — and, if so, how? Can we find evidence that these efforts have a lasting impact on students’ and alums’ professional and civic lives?” 

This is not the kind of information one can get from surveys, and it’s certainly more difficult to obtain than economic data like first-year earnings. To meet this challenge, Fischman, Gardner, and their team employ a qualitative method that brings deep, iterative reflection to the analysis, something that has become their signature contribution to the field.   

“We meet with students for 45 minutes to an hour in in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews,” said Sophie Blumert, one of the lead researchers on the project. “We never tell students what we are looking for. We ask them a wide range of open-ended questions, so it feels like having a good conversation with another person but someone who isn’t connected to your school. So students feel more free to open up.”  

Fischman said the approach involves listening carefully to what students say and what they don’t say. “When we ask people about their college experience, what they are getting out of it, and what they want from it, if they don’t mention these efforts, those are data.” 

The third-party nature of research means that they are able to go beyond just “self-reporting” to make sense of what the students are telling them. For example, they ask questions about the news as an unobtrusive way to understand students’ and alums’ interest in others beyond themselves. The prompt might be: “Do you stay informed about current issues in the news?” And then: “If so, how? If not, why not?”

The team also asks about mission with open-ended questions such as: “From your perspective, do you think that your school has any particular goals for its students? How do you think your school makes these goals known?”  

Understanding how well students comprehend their school’s mission is a reflection of an existing theory on the negative effects of what Fischman and Gardner coined “mission mishmash.” 

“Schools have so many priorities and so many aspirations for students that mission becomes all over the map,” she said. “And in the wake of that, students are forced to make assumptions about what is most important themselves. When all they hear about is jobs and resume building, then that’s what they focus on.” 

The inclusion of alumni in this work is particularly important. Interviewing graduates who are one year out, five years out, and ten years out about how their experiences in college influenced who they are as people can show whether these programs have any effect on the older adults who once participated in them as students.  

If Fischman knows the answer, she won’t yet reveal it, as the team is in the midst of taking on new schools, continuing to collect information, and analyze the data. She did, however, mention that in analyzing HEDCAP relative to mental models, she’s seen that students with transactional views of their college experience are more likely to have a lower score of HEDCAP, whereas students with a transformational mental model are more likely to have higher HEDCAP.  

Fischman said findings like this give her hope, and perseverance. 

“We can develop higher education capital. We can move students from a transactional mindset to a transformational one. We can get students to go beyond themselves, but we need to show that higher education can do this with empirical data, and, currently, that doesn’t exist.” 

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

A Simple Step for Schools to Save Lives

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Peter McGinnes is a pre-medical neuroscience student at Stanford University whose lived experience with a suicide attempt has shaped his path. Today, he channels that experience into advocating for better access to mental health care, particularly for students.

Every year, thousands of students in mental health crises are left searching for resources. What if, printed on their university ID card, were three digits that could make reaching out for help just that much easier?

People often imagine suicide as dramatic or obvious, but that usually is not the case. Most students struggle silently, showing up to class, keeping up appearances, while feeling increasingly isolated and overwhelmed. That silence is exactly what makes it so hard to notice, and why accessible resources matter.

I know, because I’ve been there. As a teenager, I felt trapped, convinced no one could understand. My grades stayed high, my face appeared calm, but internally, I was breaking down. Mental health resources were hidden behind webpages and brochures that no one gave a second thought. I didn’t know there was a national hotline, much less that calling it could mean someone would listen.

I spiraled until I couldn’t anymore. I attempted to take my life and spent two months in a residential treatment center. For the first time, I was surrounded by people who could relate to my pain. I learned to sit with my thoughts instead of drowning in them. I left stronger, but still fragile.

Months later, I saw a poster in my doctor’s office: “988 – National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.” The numbers stuck with me like a song lyric you hum without thinking. Later that month, I was sitting in bed at my grandmother’s house, heart racing, chest tight, feeling like silence might swallow me whole. I dialed the three numbers. 

On the other end was a calm voice. Someone who didn’t rush or judge me. We talked through coping strategies, and by the end of the call, I wasn’t magically healed, but the fog had lifted just enough for me to keep going. In that moment, that was all I could ask for.

I saw a poster in my doctor’s office: “988 – National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.” Later that month, I was sitting in bed at my grandmother’s house, heart racing, chest tight, feeling like silence might swallow me whole. I dialed the three numbers. 

That night taught me the power of a small, timely gesture. In behavioral science, they call it a nudge: a simple change in how choices are presented that makes a better outcome more likely. Think about putting vegetables at eye level in a grocery store instead of banning junk food. The choice remains, but the path to the healthier option becomes clearer. For someone in crisis, seeing three digits on their student ID card could work the same way. The difference between knowing or not knowing about 988 could be the difference between spiraling and picking up the phone.

The 988 National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is a 24/7/365, publicly-funded resource that has been shown to save lives. The problem is awareness. According to a 2024 poll by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, fewer than one in four Americans are even “somewhat familiar” with 988. That means millions of people could be reaching for help without knowing the resource exists. 

Students are particularly vulnerable. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for people ages 15-24. And college counseling centers are overwhelmed with wait times that stretch for several weeks. In moments of acute crisis, students cannot afford to wait until their next appointment or go searching through Google for resources. They need support in the moment.

That’s why printing 988 on student ID cards matters. Contact with 988 is on the rise. In just a year, calls to the lifeline rose by 48 percent and texts by 1445 percent, a clear sign that, as the visibility and accessibility of the number increase, so does its use. Printing 988 on an ID card, an item students carry everywhere, means they don’t have to remember a poster or navigate a website in a moment of panic. The number is right there.

What makes this initiative so powerful is how little it costs. Universities already reprint IDs regularly. Adding three digits is a minor design tweak. Schools spend thousands on wellness campaigns and programming; yet this simple step might reach more students than all of those efforts combined. 

Some states are already leading the way. New York and Virginia, for example, have passed laws requiring schools to include 988 on student ID cards. That progress is encouraging, but a patchwork approach isn’t enough. Mental health crises don’t stop at state borders, and neither should access to lifesaving numbers.

That’s why national advocacy is critical. As a council member for the Coalition for Student Wellbeing (C4SW), I have seen firsthand how powerful coordinated action can be. C4SW’s mission is simple: bridge the gap between students and decision-makers through advocacy, collaboration, and education. Printing 988 on IDs is exactly the kind of systemic fix we aim to achieve. That is why the coalition has launched a national advocacy campaign to add 988 to student ID cards.

I am still here today, not because I am stronger than anyone else, but because in a moment of silence, help was within reach. 

Universities can make this change now. Legislators can make it standard nationwide. This is not about saving every life; no single policy can do that. It is about ensuring that every student has a fighting chance to reach for help when they need it most.

Points of Entry

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Khaleigh Reed stood onstage recently at the University of Colorado Boulder introducing an author she admired: Ibram X. Kendi, the writer of “How to Be an Antiracist.” The event was the keynote of the university’s five-day Martin Luther King Jr. celebration, and the role was an honor for the senior, president of the Black Women’s Alliance. 

It was a moment she could not have imagined just a few years earlier, beginning community college in her hometown of Colorado Springs. At the time, applying to a four-year university felt out of reach with the limited scholarships available to her. But after a few years of deliberate academic and financial planning, Reed found herself not just introducing Kendi onstage but nearing completion of a bachelor’s degree and considering jobs and graduate programs beyond.

“The transition from community college to Boulder wasn’t always easy, but this is the way it worked for me,” said Reed, a senior. “Now I’m in a great place. I’m a very different person than I was then, and I saved a lot of money.”

Reed’s journey from a local community college to a bachelor’s degree represents one of many ways to achieve career credentials. The latest figures for higher education show a small uptick in enrollment and underscore the significance of community college — as well as students’ growing awareness of their diverse options. Overall enrollment figures from fall 2025 show a 1 percent increase, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Within that number are micro stories: The community college sector experienced a 3 percent increase, the lion’s share of growth, while public four-year colleges went up 1.4 percent. Private for-profit and nonprofit four-year colleges saw a decline of 2 percent and 1.6 percent, respectively.

The figures reflect more than the current crisis of affordability, said Martha Parham, senior vice president of public relations at the American Association of Community Colleges, though there’s that. They affirm the tactical, versatile ways community college helps students achieve their career goals — whether that involves gaining transfer credits affordably, training to join a manufacturing workforce, or testing one’s chops in the arts.

“The strategic use of community college is just a smart way when we think about the student loan crisis and excessive debt,” she said. “Community colleges are responsive to the needs of their local communities, they’re accredited, they’re affordable, and they’re accessible.” 

What appears to be fueling growing interest now is their role in the conversation about return on investment and students’ strategic appreciation of the ways they can customize offerings for their own goals.

There is a well-documented history of prominent Americans who’ve attended community colleges. Jackie Robinson attended Pasadena Junior College before transferring to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he became the first athlete to letter in four sports. Steve Jobs took classes at De Anza College after leaving Reed College. Arnold Schwarzenegger studied business at Santa Monica College after immigrating to the United States, his accessible entry point into American entrepreneurship. Designer Eileen Fisher, chef Guy Fieri, and performers Queen Latifah, Halle Berry, and Tom Hanks all credit community college with giving them their starts.

About 40 to 45 percent of all undergraduate students in the United States are enrolled in community college, a figure that swelled to its current levels dramatically in the late 20th century and has been fairly constant since. What appears to be fueling growing interest now is their role in the conversation about return on investment and students’ strategic appreciation of the ways they can customize offerings for their own goals: for dual enrollment (high school students taking courses), associate’s degree and certification programs, and affordable credit attainment en route to a bachelor’s degree. 

High Schoolers in Higher Ed

Of the added 3 percent of students who enrolled in community colleges in fall 2025, almost one third of them were 17 or younger, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center — meaning, they were still in high school. This “dual enrollment” status enables students to earn transferable college credits before they graduate. What was once a niche option for advanced students has become a more mainstream pathway, a way to reduce college costs and accelerate time to degree. And in some communities where high schools are under-resourced, community college can be the only way students can take the courses they need to pursue more challenging or specialized paths.

When Emily Harmon attended high school in a rural corner of northeast New York, her small school didn’t offer many science options. A single K-12 building served about 330 students, didn’t offer any Advanced Placement or honors classes, and had limited electives. She wanted to pursue engineering and, throughout her junior and senior years, took classes at two community colleges. After graduation, she attended Cornell with a full scholarship. 

In this way, dual enrollment blurs the boundary between secondary and postsecondary education, reframing college credits as something students can work toward directly while in high school — for a cost, Harmon noted, not much more than the price would have been to take the A.P. exam toward college credit.

“In the world of underfunded rural public education, it was decent setup,” she recalled. “I think it’s always a good thing to show that you took the most advanced classes possible in your situation, and in my case, that’s how I could do it. And if I went to a New York state college or a less stringent private university, I could’ve placed out of a lot with those credits.” Cornell did not accept the credits for her science classes taken in high school. But Harmon notes that one of her classmates who took the same science classes was able to enter the State University of New York at Albany with the credits of a mid-year sophomore. 

Certifications and the Pipeline to E.M.T.s, Apple, and BMW

Two-year degrees and short-term certificate programs — many designed to be completed in months — draw students to community college seeking fast, practical routes into the workforce. These programs are often built in close partnership with regional employers and tailored to labor needs.

This workforce focus is not incidental; it is foundational. Many of the fastest-growing jobs in the U.S. economy now require education beyond high school, but not necessarily a four-year degree. Community colleges occupy that middle ground, translating employer demand into credentials that are short, targeted, and relatively affordable. They train the majority of the nation’s nurses and first responders, as well as workers in fields like advanced manufacturing, cybersecurity, and logistics — roles that keep regional economies running but rarely feature in the public’s image of higher education.

To get a sense of what’s available, prospective students need only call their local community college, which in many cases, has programs aligned with other communities and states, as well.

“There are thousands of different programs across the country that speak to a local workforce with global computing skills, like an Arizona school with an environment to train cyber security experts mimicking real hacking scenarios,” said Parham of the A.A.C.C. “But we also have very local programs that service the local workforce with curricula that align directly with available regional jobs. South Carolina has a program for certified BMW mechanics. Tesla does in its backyard. I’ve seen slot machine repair technicians come out of programs in Nevada. Community colleges are responsive to local business needs.” 

The appeal of these programs extends beyond recent high school graduates. Community colleges enroll a disproportionate number of older students — parents, midcareer workers, and people returning to school after job disruptions — many of whom are balancing education with work and family responsibilities. For them, short-term credentials offer a quicker return on investment and a clearer link between education and employment than traditional degree programs.

Community College as On-ramp to a Bachelor’s Degree

When he was a high-performing high school junior in Massachusetts, Robert carved out a unique way to enrich both his academic path and his passions while saving money. After he graduated high school, he spent one year taking core courses at a local community college while performing gig work in a regional jazz ensemble. A year later, when he was accepted into the University of Massachusetts Amherst Commonwealth Honors College, he was able to focus exclusively on his joint degree in math and computer science. 

“Community College allowed him to knock out all prerequisite courses,” said his mother, who is a youth career coach. She praised the excellent adjuncts at her son’s community college, where teaching was grounded in real-world experience. “Financially, the cost for the year was 10 percent of a residential private or out-of-state public four-year college. And the wider age range of peers really helped younger students see how adults process a day of mixed learning and work, which was a great model for being organized and serious.”

This use of community college as a low-cost on-ramp to a bachelor’s degree is a popular one. Like Khaleigh Reed, students accrue basic credits at a local community college for a year or two, then plan to transfer to a four-year institution — maintaining a minimum G.P.A. to take advantage of transfer-guarantee and articulation agreements that allow students to move seamlessly into public four-year institutions. Programs such as California’s Associate Degree for Transfer and the New England Transfer Guarantee are designed to remove uncertainty from the process while dramatically reducing the cost of a bachelor’s degree. Currently, about 31 states have some form of transfer program to ensure and ease transition to the state’s public universities.

All of which sounds good on paper. But life has a way of being complex, particularly for students whose family, financial, and work circumstances made four-year college difficult in the first place. An estimated 80 percent of community college students begin with the intention to pursue a four-year degree, a transfer process often called the “2+2 pathway.” In actuality, about 30 percent do transfer to a four-year school within six years, and roughly half of those complete the bachelor’s degree, according to a joint report by the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University; the Aspen Institute College Excellence Program; and the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.  

“Priorities change. Life gets lifey. I had all the best intentions of finishing or trying something new, but fate throws you a few curve balls,” said Yvette, a single mother and social services administrator in Rhode Island. “Sometimes your workaround ends up being fine after all. What I do is rewarding.” 

Education is, after all, a course of discovery, and a lower-priced school lowers the stakes if the path ends up not being the right one. Knowing that outcomes can be mixed makes the price point especially important. What is the harm in of venturing to take a basic class in computing, or introduction to acting? 

Tom Hanks is a case in point. He took some classes at Chabot Community College, where he first began to study acting, then transferred to state college for a year before dropping out to pursue acting full-time. “That place made me what I am today,” he wrote in a New York Times opinion piece and love letter to the appetite-whetting possibilities of community college.

The experience, he wrote, was formative not because it pointed immediately to a career, but because it allowed him to experiment without the financial pressure to decide too quickly — an approach he later credited with shaping how he thinks about storytelling and creative work. 

“Classes I took at Chabot have rippled through my professional pond. I produced the HBO mini-series ‘John Adams’ with an outline format I learned from a pipe-smoking historian, James Coovelis, whose lectures were riveting,” he wrote. “High school graduates without the finances for a higher education can postpone taking on big loans and maybe luck into the class that will redefine their life’s work.”

Hanks, for one, is a big fan of free community college, some form of which is available in about 35 states. These programs, many called College Promise or Reconnect, often offer two years of free tuition for eligible in-state students who meet certain conditions, like G.P.A. requirements and income limits.

His hope, he wrote, is that free community college will lower obstacles to veterans, mothers, workers who have been out of the job market, and high school graduates without the finances for a higher education who might luck into the class that will inspire their life’s work.

“Many lives,” he wrote, “will be changed.”

SAMHSA Grant Reversal Fuels Additional Anxiety in the Field   

Posted on by Mollie Ames

On Wednesday morning, Scott Delaney woke up to an email from an address he didn’t recognize. In a hasty 6 a.m. message, the writer explained to have been hearing from contacts at community-based organizations running substance use disorder and harm reduction programs that “their grants were all cancelled.” The stranger wondered: Had Delaney, who leads Grant Witness, an online database tracking federal grant terminations, heard the same?

In fact Delaney hadn’t — yet. By 10 a.m., NPR broke the story that, the previous night, the Trump administration had notified hundreds that their funding from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) had been terminated, apparently due to misalignment with “agency priorities.” Upwards of 2,100 grants were cancelled, worth a total around $2 billion. Delaney’s Signal threads blew up. Emails and web form submissions reporting specific grant terminations and requesting information flowed in. The Grant Witness team spent the day building a new system to track SAMHSA grants. Come evening, Delaney had put his kids to bed and was settling back down at the computer when he learned the Trump administration had reversed its decision: The cancelled grants are now restored.

In that moment, following the news of reinstatement, silence fell upon the Grant Witness Slack chat. Delaney described a sense of relief, perhaps second only to disbelief: a stomach-clench of mixed emotions no doubt reflecting the experience of mental health professionals across the country. They had spent hours mobilizing, scrambling for answers, only to end up with a new set of questions, among them: Is it over?

This latest instance of federal policy whiplash plays into a larger pattern that makes it difficult for some to completely shake off concerns.

Certain developments on this front have been reassuring. That lawmakers from across the political aisle activated to restore the funding indicates vast support for these programs, which widely focus on suicide prevention and substance use treatment, including for young people. The letter SAMHSA sent rescinding the terminations also seems to promise a quick return to regular programming. “Your award will remain active under its original terms and conditions,” a copy of the email obtained by LearningWell states. “Please disregard the prior termination notice and continue program activities as outlined in your award agreement.” 

But this latest instance of federal policy whiplash plays into a larger pattern that makes it difficult for some to completely shake off concerns. This fall, LearningWell covered the ongoing uncertainty that has weighed on mental health researchers over the fate of federally funded projects. Throughout 2025, mass grant freezes and terminations by the National Institutes of Health, for example, disrupted scientific research across a range of disciplines. In the case of mental health, the particularly unfunny irony is of course that the stress of these cuts has been damaging to the mental health — and careers and livelihoods — of the researchers themselves. 

“It’s really hard to know and trust, frankly, the information and know how it’s going to play out,” said Sara Abelson, the senior director of training and education at The Hope Center for Student Basic Needs at Temple University. At the junction of mental health and higher education, the ground beneath her has felt shaky for a while now. Amid this week’s cuts, Abelson paid special attention to one grant impacted that provides funds to colleges and universities: the Garrett Lee Smith Campus Suicide Prevention program. According to research Abelson has been conducting on federal grants for student basic needs, between 2016 and 2024, G.L.S. touched nearly 250 campuses in 45 states and Puerto Rico. These are the kind of wide-reaching “lifesaving supports” she said have been threatened. Will next time be for real? 

Delaney also isn’t quite ready to unwind. Well-versed in the grant cancellation and restoration process, he worries about how long it will take this round. On Wednesday, some grantees shared with him documents, called Notices of Award, they received reestablishing their funding to zero. These NOAs are legal contracts, with the terms offset, in Delaney’s experience, only when a new one is issued. So, he wonders, are the grantees technically owed their original funds at this point? Will some end up pausing their work out of caution? SAMHSA did not respond immediately to a request for comment as to whether revised NOAs will be sent or the expected timeline.

Others worry, because the potential reasons for the original cancellations remain, future cuts may still be coming. Kathleen Ethier, the former director of the division of adolescent and school health at the Centers for Disease Control, believes U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s expressed views on the over-discussion and over-pathologization of youth mental health issues don’t bode well for the future of related initiatives. “I do think that there is an ideological reason why these grants were targeted,” she said, “and I do think we have to remain vigilant about the ways in which this administration is going to support young people’s mental health in schools.” 

The continuous federal funding upheaval may have had at least one positive outcome for mental health advocates, though. Now they know how to respond. While Delaney said the initial rush following this week’s terminations — to organize his team and collect new information and field inquiries all at once — felt akin to Whac-A-Mol, previous experience helped him maintain a sense of control. “I think because we’ve done this before, honestly, I felt ready to tackle this,” he said. “We knew what to do, we knew who to contact, and we were going to be able to put together a database that was going to be really helpful, and we were going to be able to do it really well, really fast.”

“It’s really, really energizing to see the vast numbers of folks pull together, the communities activate and mobilize, and you can draw a lot of strength from that,” Delaney said.

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

Understanding Mattering with Jennifer Wallace

Posted on by Mollie Ames

In this episode of LearningWell Radio, journalist and bestselling author Jennifer Wallace discusses her forthcoming book, “Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose.” She explains what mattering is; why it’s crucial to wellbeing, particularly among young people; and how we can pursue mattering in our lives to the benefit of ourselves and those around us. 

“Mattering” is available now for pre-order and for purchase on January 27.

Listen now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

Student Mental Health Advocates Want 988 Lifeline on all College IDs

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Two years ago, a common interest in mental health advocacy landed two young college students from different ends of the country in the same virtual room. They didn’t know it yet, but their meeting would launch not just a friendship but a working partnership with national implications. 

Carson Domey, then a sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, and Shriya Garg, in her first year at the University of Georgia, started swapping strategies, sharing the trials and errors of their mental health advocacy work. Domey told Garg about his efforts as a teenager in Massachusetts to get schools to print the suicide prevention hotline on the back of student ID cards. Garg, intrigued, ran with the idea and found success with it on her own college campus.

Today, Domey and Garg are the leaders of the Coalition for Student Wellbeing, a nonprofit Domey founded in 2024 to unite college students across the country who want to affect mental health change at their institutions. The coalition’s first major campaign is to promote the inclusion of the now three-digit 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline on student IDs at as many colleges and universities as possible. 

Both Domey and Garg see the initiative as a relatively simple way to achieve critical, even life-saving, results. As Garg put it, “it’s just a small change that has a big, big impact.” 

18 to 25-year-olds report to suffer from mental illness more than any other adult demographic; yet they may be lacking a critical awareness of the resources that can help as well as the instinct to seek them out. 

In July 2022, 988 replaced a 10-digit number as the national hotline to call or text for support during a mental health or substance abuse-related crisis. But according to a 2023 study, nearly 57 percent of 1,345 college students surveyed didn’t know the 988 Lifeline existed; 20 percent said if they were in a crisis, they would not contact any services at all. 

A more recent poll found up to 82 percent of 18 to 24 year-olds had at least heard of 988, although only 28 percent of all respondents of any age indicated they were somewhat or very familiar with the service.

Adding 988 to college IDs places the tool literally in the palm of students’ hands. “You can’t get anywhere without a student ID,” Garg said of the card’s constant companionship. “It’s like your identity as a college student. You memorize your number — that’s how you take your tests, that’s how you get into all the buildings, that’s how you get into your dorm, that’s how you get into your dining halls.”

Perhaps even more than a resource, IDs that include 988 deliver a message to students: that their school and administration care about campus wellbeing and want to offer support. “It’s nice to know from the get-go that there’s someone or there’s something there for you,” Garg said. That comfort, she added, is not only for young people but also their parents, eager for assurances their student will be okay on his own.

“It’s nice to know from the get-go that there’s someone or there’s something there for you.”

The coalition’s campaign is not so much a new idea as it is a nudge towards one that has not yet reached its promise. Legislation in 25 states already mandates the inclusion of 988 on student IDs. To reach colleges and universities in the remaining 35, Domey and Garg have mapped a plan of attack, featuring their preferred three-pronged approach: education, advocacy, and collaboration, specifically across the student-administrator divide. 

So far, the coalition has partnered with the youth mental health nonprofit Active Minds to produce a toolkit for students interested in starting the campaign on their own campuses. They then followed up the release of the toolkit with a webinar to share additional information and field questions from students.

2026 is ushering in a new chapter of advocacy as the coalition launches an outreach campaign targeting the student governments at the five most populated colleges and universities in states where 988 is not yet required. The goal is to inspire existing student leaders to take up the initiative on their own campuses.

A particular benefit of the 988 appeal, especially as a starting point for the coalition, is that it requires a fairly low lift from the administrative point of view. Garg even called the effort “low hanging fruit.” 

“We’re not asking the school to come up with a new resource. 988 is free; it’s federally funded; it’s there,” Domey said. “We have a very strong case for why this should cost zero dollars and zero cents for schools.”

Keeping the Connection 

The coalition’s leaders are hopeful that developing a broad network of student changemakers will pave the way for their future projects. “I think there’s going to be so many long-lasting relationships with different campuses across the country that will be created from this initiative,” Domey said. “It really shows the value that we hope to demonstrate in terms of being a resource to student leaders.” 

As Domey and Garg well know, student mental health advocates need each other’s support; their battles are never easily won. Before Garg turned her attention to the 988 work, she was championing the implementation of student mental health screenings in universities. Though the cause itself is still alive, Garg’s progress stalled in the face of certain barriers, like privacy and liability concerns, too big to climb.

Domey is particularly familiar with the fits and starts of bureaucratic policy change, especially in large institutions where the coalition stands to have the deepest impact. “Even though we can have some of the most supportive administrators, faculty, and staff and students behind this,” he said, “things are still sometimes going to take time.” 

One asset in the coalition’s corner is the prominent advisory board of higher education leaders Domey has nurtured and engaged. Members include presidents Mark Gearan of Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Domenico Grasso of the University of Michigan.  

Kent Willis, another advisor, is the senior vice president for enrollment and student engagement at Stephen F. Austin State University. He said he’s been involved in the 988 campaign primarily to offer guidance on navigating diverse university systems and introduce Domey to personal connections on various campuses.

“Yes, all colleges and universities share some similarities, but the governance structure can be very different,” Willis said. He’s been counseling Domey, asking: “How is it that you create that common collaborative conversation for the initiative to get as far as it can in order to make the ultimate impact that we all hope that it would make?”

While ready to leverage his expertise and connection for the cause, Willis also stressed the importance that the messaging continues to come from students themselves. “It adds that other level of validity to the work,” he said, “because the student voice is extremely important and student leaders hold a significant role as a stakeholder group.”

Even if school leadership doesn’t ultimately institute the change to student IDs, Willis said the coalition’s campaign could be successful just by having reached the right ears in the right rooms. “It allows or invites a conversation that maybe hadn’t been happening in the highest level decision-making conversations.”

For Domey, the ultimate driving force of the campaign continues to be the number of students it stands to help. In the master spreadsheet he created — with the hundreds of student government contacts the coalition hopes to reach — he also included a column for the total enrollment at each school. 

“As we hopefully start to see the spreadsheet light up green with schools that have changed,” Domey said, “we can tangibly see how many students we’re impacting.”

You can reach the Coalition for Student Wellbeing at advocacy@c4sw.org for more information about the 988 campaign.

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

Attention Activism with D. Graham Burnett

Posted on by Mollie Ames

D. Graham Burnett, a professor at Princeton University, discusses his new book “Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement,” which warns of the exploitation, by the tech industry, of one of the world’s most precious commodities: human attention.

Listen now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.  

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

Colors and Connections

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Xochitl Casillas’ students were moping again. As the dean of Chicano Latino student affairs at the Claremont Colleges, she had come to expect this phenomenon: When February rolled around, and Valentine’s Day became imminent, those without partners seemed to feel their singledom more keenly than ever. She called them, affectionately, the “lonely hearts club.” She also wanted to help.

Starting last year, Casillas organized an event on Valentine’s Day-eve for students who didn’t want to be alone to come together. The main activity was an art workshop, called Campus Colors and Connection, which asks students to consider the feelings different colors provoke and then create abstract drawings to represent those feelings or related experiences. By sharing their work and thinking with each other, they could learn more about their peers, as well as themselves.

“This is the time where a lot of people who want partnership may not have it,” Casillas remembered telling the group. “But today, this is an opportunity to connect.”

The workshop Casillas led her students through was developed by The Foundation for Art and Healing, a nonprofit that promotes the arts as an intervention for loneliness. Jeremy Nobel, M.D., Ph.D., a physician and lecturer at Harvard Medical School, started the foundation to explore the impact of the arts on health generally but pivoted towards developing arts-based resources for loneliness about a decade ago. At that point, loneliness was emerging as a predominant mental health concern, and research had begun to suggest what Nobel already suspected: The arts could help.

Today, with loneliness widely considered a national crisis and young adults particularly affected, Nobel continues to believe in art as an antidote. Lately, he and his team have made a special push to bring their work to colleges and universities. Educators, like Casillas, all too familiar with their students’ struggles, have become eager partners. Even those who might question handing crayons to twenty-somethings are considering: Can they afford not to try?

“I think loneliness is where depression was 20 years ago,” Nobel said, “where people didn’t even want to say it out loud.” In other words, Americans may have come around to the idea that depression is a medical condition, rather than a personal defect, but they don’t necessarily treat loneliness with the same open mind. Nobel, whose background is in internal medicine, likes to say loneliness is just a biological signal that a person needs to connect, like feeling thirsty is a signal to drink water. He urges others to adopt this same understanding, or risk the consequences. 

Evidence shows that, physically, loneliness can make people vulnerable to inflammation, higher blood pressure, and a weaker immune system. Mentally, they may act less rationally and more impulsively; they may begin to see the world as threatening. And the lonelier they stay, the more threatening the world seems and the more difficult it becomes to develop connections in the future. Nobel calls this “spiraling.” 

Young people report to be the loneliest of any age group, despite seeming so well-connected online. Even considering the end of the pandemic and return to in-person learning, Gen Z continues to indicate widespread loneliness; in 2024, up to eight in 10 were saying they had been lonely in the last year. As for why, a slew of familiar explanations abounds, like the impact of social media, drawing youth away from “real” human interaction. 

Art and Healing

For Nobel, the connection between loneliness and the arts wasn’t immediately apparent. At first, his interest in the health impacts of creative expression was focused on how it might help treat acute trauma. He had personally sensed the benefits after using poetry to make sense of his feelings about the Sept. 11 attacks. A psychologist overseeing a similar brand of work in a more formal setting confirmed patients were finding relief, specifically across race and class backgrounds. 

“The arts seemed to be helpful across all these wide horizons,” Nobel said, “which meant something was going on that really rewired your brain in some important ways.” 

In 2003, Nobel launched The Foundation for Art and Healing, eager to explore the effects himself. He kept the focus on trauma-affected groups — first those with military backgrounds, then those dealing with sexual, domestic, meteorologic, and other forms of trauma. As the scope expanded, Nobel heard a common refrain: The programs “made them less lonely and more connected.” 

Brain imaging now shows how areas associated with social connection light up while subjects engage with art.

Science was catching up, too. Brain imaging now shows how areas associated with social connection light up while subjects engage with art. Other findings suggest it can reduce hormones associated with stress and increase “feel-good” ones, like dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. 

As evidence mounted, the foundation turned its attention fully to art’s possible sway over loneliness. In its current form, the organization aims to raise awareness and reduce stigma around loneliness, as well as disseminate research-based programs that help people connect. Offerings include original films, online exercises, and in-person workshops, all within the organization’s signature initiative, Project UnLonely.

Core to all this work, and meant to maximize its impact, is the foundation’s public health approach. The Foundation for Art and Healing team partners with other businesses and organizations to implement its services, rather than delivering them directly. It also prioritizes simple and low-cost interventions that don’t require prior medical or professional training to implement. “The key is to do things that meet three criteria: effectiveness, scalability, and sustainability,” Nobel said.  

While the foundation also targets the general public, the elderly, and workers in high-stress environments, Gen Z has become a particular focus. Community-based organizations like museums and libraries can be good partners for reaching the 18 to 28-year-old demo. But, Nobel said, “by far the most direct way is through colleges and universities.” 

So far, the foundation has reached more than 50 campuses and 6,000 students. The institutions range from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health to large public research universities in the south and small community colleges on the west coast. The activities appeal to a range of campus community members, including those in student affairs, residential life, spiritual life, athletics, and even campus museums. 

At the Claremont Colleges, students used the Campus Colors and Connection exercise to explore their common cultural identity. When Casillas asked them to represent, through different colors and shapes, what brings them joy, for example, she said her Latino students depicted cooking with a grandparent in the Dominican Republic, swinging in a hammock in Puerto Rico, and speaking Spanish. She watched them become eager to tell their stories and encourage new friends to do the same. 

“People are like, ‘Oh, it feels like we’re back in elementary school. We’re just coloring,’” Casillas said. “But I think they didn’t realize how vulnerable they were going to get.” After the 45-minute Valentine’s Day session ended, students lingered to continue the conversation.

The simplicity, perhaps child-like nature, of the exercise might push some away. But Nobel said the playfulness is the point. It’s also part of the draw as a less intimidating, or clinical, form of self-care. “We never frame it as therapy,” he said of the workshops. “We often don’t even use the word loneliness in our promotion of it.” Instead, the directive is simple: “Create and connect.”

Expanding Connections

The University of New England was an early adopter of Campus Colors and Connection, starting about four years ago. Coming out of the pandemic, Dean of Students Jennifer DeBurro said she and her team decided to take a “10,000-foot view” of the student wellbeing issue: “We were asking ourselves questions about on-ramps: What are some of the additional ways that we could provide opportunities for students to connect with peers in a low-risk, easy way?” That’s when they were introduced to Nobel’s work. 

First a one-off program, Campus Colors and Connection is now part of U.N.E.’s orientation program. “They can just talk — talk about what’s making them nervous about going off to school, talk about what’s exciting, reflect on a memory,” DeBurro said of incoming students.

When it comes to evaluating the workshop, the primary mechanism is the survey students fill out after participating. Questions prompt them to reflect generally on the experience, and so far, the results are positive. The vast majority have reported they would recommend the workshop to others (96 percent), as well as feeling more in touch with their emotions (84 percent) and more connected to their peers (84 percent). 79 percent of those who indicated feeling lonely beforehand said they felt less lonely afterwards. 

Yet Nobel recognizes the survey work isn’t as robust as it could be. He hopes to expand assessment to consider the potential impact on student success, including academic performance and retention. “Does being more connected increase learning? All the evidence says it should,” he said. 

As the foundation aims to strengthen assessment efforts, Claremont and U.N.E. continue to extend their partnerships with the foundation. Casillas has now led Campus Colors and Connection not only for her Latino students broadly but with a group of student mentors, who learned to run a version of the session themselves. She also brought the workshop to fellow staff. 

U.N.E. recently began offering a tailored version of the Campus Colors and Connection for first-gen students. “We continue to talk about it in as many different corners of the university as we can,” DeBurro said, “so that any opportunity we have to bring it to a new population, we do.”

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

A Year of Stories

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Dear Readers and Listeners:

As we move into 2026, I have been reflecting on the year’s worth of stories we have been honored to share in LearningWell. So much of LearningWell’s coverage mirrors what influences your work supporting student flourishing. Here’s a reference to some of the top stories that captured those struggles and gains.   

2025 may be remembered as one of the most disruptive years in higher education, set apart by numerous drivers of uncertainty and anxiety, all of which influenced campus wellbeing. “Without a Net,” “A Voice for High-Needs Students,”and “Uncertainty Weighs on Mental Health Researchers” were some of our stories that captured those dynamics, including the impact of federal upheaval on financial distress, equity initiatives, and research.

Student mental health issues remained at the forefront of higher education concerns and policies. At LearningWell, we tracked the latest national data in student wellbeing, while delving into the key factors at play: We heard about the influence of social media from psychologist Jean Twenge and of A.I. from reporter Beth McMurtry. Reflections from students and recent graduates offered first-hand insight into the mounting pressures they’re feeling. And we acknowledged the continued rise of mental health and wellbeing among institutional priorities, covering the Princeton Review’s Campus Mental Health Survey and The Wall Street Journal’s use of the Human Flourishing Project’sflourishing scale to rank the best colleges. 

But amidst these challenges, resilience, perseverance and innovation abounded. Practitioners and administrators across the country began thinking more holistically about student mental health, focusing on population outcomes, preventative strategies, and curricular and co-curricular partnerships, as reflected in these articles: “Leading the Next Chapter of College Mental Health,” “New Thinking in College Student Mental Health,” “Be REAL,” and “Experience U.”

Perhaps the best way of chronicling this progress in student-centered education is by telling the stories of the people doing this work and the places where it is unfolding. The institutions within the LearningWell Coalition continue to forge new programs and pedagogies aimed at preparing students to flourish in life and work — schools like Lehigh University, Roanoke College, Boston College and the University of Utah, among others. 

Character education has emerged as a constructive pathway toward human development goals, like curiosity, empathy, and intellectual integrity. LearningWell has featured a number of these programs set in unusual contexts, such as sports fandoms, cultural reconciliation, global peacebuilding, and intellectual virtues.   

As we look forward to another year of telling your stories, a sincere thank you for supporting ours at LearningWell magazine. 

All the best for a great new year! 

Marjorie Malpiede, Editor-in-Chief

You can reach LearningWell Editor-in-Chief Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

The Stories They Tell Themselves

Posted on by Mollie Ames

On an overcast afternoon last fall, Khaleigh Reed stood with crowds at the University of Colorado Boulder football stadium. She had transferred to the school the year before and had been feeling “kind of alien.” The game ended, and she stood talking to people she’d only recently met. As the skies opened into rain, the crowd spilled out of the stands and onto the grass, and she and her new friends joined them, laughing together and running with the large gathering of students. 

For Reed, a senior journalism major who had transferred from a community college at the start of her junior year, the moment felt cinematic.

“I’d hit it off with these two people at the game, and we were all, like, excited and happy,” she recalled. “I had this sense of relief, and with the rain and friends and community all running onto the field, it was like the feel-good end of a movie. After everything I’d been through, I was able to find some happiness.”

Months later, that memory would become an actual scene, the emotional center of a three-minute digital story Reed created as part of a pilot project housed at C.U. Boulder’s Renée Crown Wellness Institute. The project invited more than a half-dozen undergraduate students to craft multimedia narratives about their own experiences of “flourishing” — a positive term the institute uses without rigid definition.

Reed’s experience became part of a prototype for a new digital storytelling initiative being designed by the Crown Institute to be shared with educators the Flourishing Academic Network, or FAN, a consortium of universities committed to advancing wellbeing in higher education. At one level, the project was intimate: nine undergraduates meeting over six sessions, workshopping drafts and learning how to shape a story that could be shared aloud. At another level, the project was taking shape as the infrastructure of something larger. What unfolded in those rooms would eventually be distilled into a physical toolkit — a carefully designed, printable and digital guide intended to help other campuses create similar spaces for student storytelling.  

“One of our aims is to elevate youth voice,” said Michelle Shedro, a researcher at the Crown Institute who helped lead the project and design the toolkit. “Not just as an outcome, but as a way of doing the work. Tapping into youth voice is both a tool and a goal of ours.”

A Container for Voice

The digital storytelling pilot grew out of a broader question the Crown Institute has been asking for years: How do students themselves understand wellbeing?

Founded in 2018, the Crown Institute conducts interdisciplinary, participant-based research on youth and adult wellness. Its work spans maternal mental health, K-12 education, and campus-based initiatives such as Mindful Campus, a long-running program that offers courses and programming for students, faculty, and staff. But the digital storytelling project marked a distinct turn — one that placed student voice not only at the center of the findings but at the center of the method.

Rather than asking students to respond to surveys or predefined frameworks, the institute invited them to tell stories — in their own voices, with their own images, shaped through a guided but flexible process of storytelling in multimedia form.

“Digital storytelling is very adaptable to various disciplines and topics. People have many different ways of telling their stories, and it’s really dynamic and fun,” Shedro said. “So we wanted to give young people the tools to do this, and we also wanted to be able to learn from what they create around the question: What does flourishing mean to you?”

In this way, the project is both research and invitation, said Jenna Bensko, the outreach and education project manager at the Crown Institute. “When we create the container — the opportunity — and when students feel a sense of belonging, the flourishing happens.”

To facilitate the pilot, the Crown Institute partnered with faculty from the University of Colorado Denver, including Marty Otañez, an associate professor of anthropology and a longtime practitioner of community-based digital storytelling. Otañez described the work less as teaching students how to edit video and more as helping them learn how to land a story. Over six sessions totaling 24 hours, students moved through a carefully sequenced process: journaling and free-writing, story circles, writers’ workshops, and storyboarding before ever opening editing software. 

The early sessions focused almost entirely on building trust — learning one another’s names, sharing fragments of ideas, listening without rushing to respond. “The soul of the process is community,” Otañez says. “You can’t shortcut that.”

Only later did the technical work begin: recording voiceovers, selecting images, and learning DaVinci Resolve, the editing platform used during the pilot. Even then, Otañez emphasized restraint. Images were meant to deepen meaning, not illustrate every noun. Metaphor mattered more than polish. But at the core of it all was each person’s choice of a story, which for Otanez is part of the rich process of discovery and reminder to always expect the unexpected. 

“Some of the things surprised me, and this is always the case. Some students are really quiet and maybe a little reserved, and so we never know what we’re going to get,” he said. “And then sometimes their stories are just so rich because with their introversion, they’re thinking so much and so deeply, and they come up with these beautiful pieces.” 

The Crown Institute’s framing of flourishing provided a lens, not a script. Students were encouraged to ask where flourishing appeared in their stories but not required to prove that it did.

The nine students who participated came from across campus — political science, finance, health sciences, journalism. Few had prior experience with digital storytelling. Some arrived with clear ideas, and others discovered their stories only after listening to their peers.

Reed remembered one classmate who shared a story about a serious health crisis — hospitalization, uncertainty, learning to live with a chronic condition. “You would never have known just by looking at them,” she said. “That really stayed with me.”

The story circle, where students read drafts aloud and receive guided feedback, became one of the most powerful sessions of the pilot. “It was like journaling,” Reed said, “but with a community.”

Students learned not only how to receive feedback, but how to give it — asking questions that clarified rather than corrected and noticing what lingered emotionally rather than what could be fixed mechanically.

One thing that interested both the facilitators and the Crown Institute organizers was the nuanced way the students seemed to accept that flourishing was a work in progress, found as much in small moments as in large ones. 

One student used hair-braiding as a metaphor for independence and belonging. Another traced academic growth through mountain climbing. Others spoke about illness, procrastination, loneliness, or the quiet relief of finding a place to stand. The stories that emerged resisted tidy conclusions.

What unified the stories was their honesty, and the facilitators had to respond without an agenda. “We were very careful not to force the message into the stories,” Otañez says. “Otherwise you lose the essence.” 

That tension — between institutional goals and individual truth — shaped the project throughout. The Crown Institute’s framing of flourishing provided a lens, not a script. Students were encouraged to ask where flourishing appeared in their stories but not required to prove that it did.

“In a lot of higher ed discourse, we focus on how hard things are,” Shedro said. “That’s real. But we also wanted to create space for hope, without denying complexity.”

At the end of the pilot, the group gathered for a small screening event. Friends, faculty, and family members attended. Each film played, and each student spoke briefly about the process. Audience members noticed things the facilitators had missed — small gestures, lines that echoed, moments that felt larger than intended. The narratives developed lives of their own in the eyes, ears, and minds of the audience. 

“That’s always what amazes me about storytelling,” Otañez said. “Once the story leaves you, it becomes something else.”

Beyond the Pilot

The digital storytelling pilot at C.U. Boulder was never intended to remain a one-off experience, contained within a single semester or a single group of students. From the outset, the Crown Institute team understood the pilot as a way of learning how to design a methodology that others might eventually adapt. Out of that work, a digital storytelling toolkit is emerging, one intended to be freely available as a PDF for use across the FAN consortium. The toolkit is not a script or a curriculum to be followed verbatim. Instead, it offers a flexible framework shaped by what unfolded during the pilot itself.

“We observed everything,” said Shedro, who led the writing and design of the toolkit. “What worked, what stalled, where students needed more time, where they needed less.”

The resulting document is organized into three broad units: an introduction to flourishing and digital storytelling; guided opportunities for writing, story circles, and reflection; and hands-on production work, including storyboarding and media assembly. Throughout, the emphasis is less on technical mastery than on process — listening, revising, choosing what to include and what to leave out.

There are recommended minimum hours, suggested facilitator ratios, and sample prompts, but little insistence on uniform outcomes. That was intentional by design.

“We wanted something that could live in a lot of different contexts,” Bensko said. “A semester-long course. A co-curricular program. A student organization. It needed to be adaptable.”

That adaptability reflects a central insight of the pilot: the definition of flourishing can’t be standardized any more than the stories that attempt to capture it. Some students told tightly framed narratives about specific moments. Others traced longer arcs — from illness, from isolation, from uncertainty toward something steadier but unresolved. The toolkit preserves that openness, encouraging facilitators to resist steering stories toward predetermined conclusions.

But equally important, Shedro noted, was laying the groundwork for collaboration — the time spent building trust and guiding students in the most effective ways to be active listeners and give constructive feedback.

In FAN meetings, interest in the toolkit has already begun to circulate, though the Crown Institute team has been careful not to rush its release. For the students who participated in the pilot, the toolkit is beside the point — a downstream product. What stays with them instead are the stories themselves and the experience of being trusted to tell and hear them.

For Khaleigh Reed, soon to enter the field of journalism, the potent experience with multimedia storytelling became further evidence of all you don’t know about a person unless you ask questions and listen well.  

“You never know what someone’s going through,” she said. “This project gave us a way to see that.”