In this week’s webinar Safety and Belonging First: Advancing Well-Being for Learning Recovery, we explored how to best cultivate well-being for students — and their parents, caregivers and teachers — as a strategy to advance equitable learning recovery as we continue to emerge from the pandemic. Experts helped us explore our own experience with well-being in a quick poll and then shared their thoughts on the definition. Karen Pittman of Knowledge to Power Catalysts and formerly of the Forum for Youth Investment and a well-known leader and advocate for thriving youth shared the following definition from the young person’s perspective:

“I have a sense of agency. I feel like I can go out and do things in the world and make a difference, and I have a sense of connectedness. I’m connected to something. I’m grounded. I have a sense of collective identity. And those put together really give you meaning and purpose.”

In addition to Pittman, CGLR was introduced to the work of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center with panelist, Maryam Abdullah, Ph.D., who shared what the organization sees as the 12 keys to well-being. Abdullah zeroed-in on the importance of ensuring that the parents of young children have access to and experience these building blocks. As she expresses below, the community surrounding the parents and children are essential factors in cultivating the building blocks:

“Someone needs to be there to put the oxygen mask on you as a parent, and that comes from a community that recognizes and honors what parenting entails. Because oftentimes the onus is on the parents who are often depleted already. So we need to be thinking about, what is the community doing to have the oxygen mask at the ready for the parents who are needing support?” 

We were lucky to then hear from a panel of CGLR community leaders who shared their specific programs and strategies designed to place those oxygen masks at the ready for parents while building the sense of connectedness in students and providing support and nurturing for teachers.