And the SEL Challenge winners are…

SCE Announces the Social and Emotional Learning Challenge Partners

For the next 18 months, eight informal learning programs for teens—ranging from a wooden boat building program in Philadelphia to a performing arts/community action hub in New York City—will join SCE as partners in the Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Challenge.

The initiative aims to elevate the importance of social and emotional learning through an intensive effort with an exceptional cohort of teen programs. The finalists were chosen from among 250 youth organizations, making this an exceptional group of youth programs that have shown striking results in their work.

SCE’s Social and Emotional Learning Challenge will explore the best practices in SEL. The collaboration teams up SCE with a research team from the David P. Weikart Center for Youth Program Quality, and the following eight high-impact organizations:

• AHA! (Attitude, Harmony, Achievement)
• Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee
• The Possibility Project
• Philadelphia Wooden Boat Factory
• Voyageur Outward Bound School
• Wyman
• Youth on Board
• YWCA Boston

The chosen partners represent some of the nation’s best-in-class programming across a range of activities from the arts, outdoor education, leadership development and activism.

Just as youth learn in these programs, SCE will learn as well—and pass on the results to youth programs everywhere. The SEL Challenge partners will form a Learning Community to identify the best practices for equipping the rising generation with the social and emotional skills of resilience, empathy, agency, self-regulation, and grit. Then, an SEL Field Guide will share the learnings of this exploration with youth workers, agency leaders, policy makers, teachers, parents and others invested in equipping the rising generation with tools needed to thrive in the 21^st century.

SCE is a social investment organization that connects talent and innovation with market forces to drive social change. Our newly launched Social and Emotional Learning Program reimagines education as a broad and rich ecosystem for learning, anytime, anywhere. Learn more about theSCE story.

The Social and Emotional Learning Challenge aims to distill and codify the practices of the SEL field’s best programs for teens to elevate the impact and importance of social and emotional learning.

Click here for the official press release announcing the Social and Emotional Learning Challenge finalists!