Pop Culture Hero Coalition Inc.

The Coalition flagship program, The Heroic Journey Social Emotional Learning and Mental Health, was produced in Partnership with YMCA of the USA. After a successful, 2 year pilot, the program is now Y-USA's nationally endorsed program. We are scaling to housing projects and underinvested schools

We aspire to achieve free, accessible, and relatable mental health tools for every child or teen in

Goal One: Our goal is to distribute The Heroic Journey Curriculum to as many K-12 schools as possible, providing free mental health tools to children, teens, and parents.

Goal Two: To expand The Heroic Journey Curriculum to address challenges in the lives of BIPOC children & teens. This includes making wise choices re substance abuse, police presence, peer pressure and violence.

Goal Three: To distribute our work for LGBTQIA youth mental health, including our identity support comic book and resilience and ally-ship support tools, which are free of charge on our site.

We applied for and received a two-year Gates Foundation Scholarship to a Network for Good program, which supports nonprofit leaders in learning key tools such as program efficacy, research, storytelling, social media outreach, fundraising, capacity-building, and growing to scale. We enlisted psychologists — including Dr. Rheeda Walker, acclaimed author of The Unapologetic Guide to Black Mental Health, and Dr. Janina Scarlet, author of Superhero Therapy — to do webinars for the leaders of our program. They taught on crucial subjects, such as resilience during COVID, as well as a Sensitive Topic Training, which provides tools and resources for teachers of children and teens in various forms of trauma, including those suffering from bullying, racism, misogyny, LGBGQIA-bullying, cyber bullying, grief, and abuse. We Partnered with Harvard Professor Michael Rich & the Boston Children’s Hospital Digital Wellness Lab to provide tools for our team to address cyber bullying & digital wellness.

The Coalition’s work for mental health in schools and events shut down in March 2020, leaving our outreach at a standstill — during a time when mental health tools are more crucial than ever. Children, teens, and parents without access to mental health care were in dire need of crucial, accessible, coping skills related to depression, anxiety, loneliness, fear, addiction, and isolation. Immediately, we enlisted our psychologists and educators to adapt a portion of The Heroic Journey Curriculum for use in homes. Within one month, we had this special edition, including pandemic-related coping tools, available on our website - free of charge - in English, Spanish, German & Italian. These coping skills and exercises include fun, relatable tools and exercises for children and teens, as well as videos for parents. Please see https://www.popculturehero.org/the-heroic-journey-at-home. YMCA of the USA saw this and enlisted us to adapt The Heroic Journey for their children in daycare — primarily children of health care heroes and first responders — and they made it available to 73 locations nationwide. This program includes 32 lesson plans with videos for children & parents, along with activities that teach mental health via sports, art, personal workbook, and interactive activities. Also - knowing the high rate of suicide attempts and mental health struggles of many LGBTQIA kids, as well as the fact that fewer than 30% have support at home - we created the 1st mental health support comic book for LGBTQIA youth, “Lights…Camera…Identity! Never Alone. We have given away 8000 copies of this resource via Centers nationwide. Our Chief Psychologist has created a corresponding set of relatable tools, worksheets & videos, teaching Resilience, Crisis Management, Building Systems of Support, Becoming an Ally, Self-Acceptance, and Boundary-Setting. Despite massive challenges, the Coalition’s work is powerfully impacting the lives of countless children, teens, and parents.