Helping kids cope with life and school in the Corona crisis

Help us get the Teal School hubs started!

Teal School Hubs are small units that can be implemented quickly and flexibly in various types of crisis situations to give children access to support and progress socially, emotionally and in their learning journey.

The disruptive powers of the Corona crisis makes our concept both the more important and more easily implemented. We have a solution and we are ready to implement it within days! What we lack is the money. So let's see what we can do together?

Some of the problems we meet

• Keeping up with schoolwork: Many children have no habit of taking responsibility for their learning. Some don't have computers at home. In Sweden schools are still open but many parents keep their kids home and teachers are left trying to teach both in the class room and through distance learning. It's stressful and hard to give all kids the support they need.
• Loneliness: children who do not usually socialize online or with few or no friends lose out, at worst, all social interaction.
• Vulnerability: Children in dysfunctional families, who in “normal” times get a break from the situation when at school, lose the opportunity with quarantine and similar situations.
• Grief, worry, stress: The whole situation with Corona is stressful for kids*. We see the need and possibility to support the children's emotional needs and to also assess and intervene when a child is showing signs that further help is needed.

Our solution
In this project called Teal School Hubs we aim at creating small, local units that provide children with social emotional support, guidance and facilitate learning. Alleviating loneliness, mental health issues, domestic strain and anxiety and at the same time supporting key workers who need care for their children when at work. Read about it at: tealschoolhubs.se

This is our Learning strategy:

What will the money be used for?
We want to start a first hub in Stockholm. There are some costs in setting this up, paying the volunteers, buying material etc. We also need to do some marketing so people will find out about this possibility. Later on we want to start more hubs, take the concept abroad and we also have plans to create a digital platform for managing the network. But let's just start with the one first hub. :-)

Who are we?
Teal School is a non-profit dedicated to making the world a better place for kids and young people by bringing the Teal** paradigm into the world of education. We are a team of five with different backgrounds. You can read more about us here: tealschool.se/about-us

Conclusion
The hub concept is solving many of the direct problems for kids in the Corona crisis and is at the same time a step towards reinventing the school system in western countries as well as bringing academic learning to places where there is none now, like refugee camps or parts of rural Africa.

We hope you would like to get this amazing project started and be listed at our website tealschoolhubs.se among our Helpers & Friends!

Footnotes
* "Even the most fortunate of U.S. children are going through a version of what's called an "adverse childhood experience" right now. That's the term researchers use for a traumatic event in a child's life, such as physical or verbal abuse, a divorce, or the death, incarceration or substance abuse of a parent." /from:https://www.npr.org/2020/04/02/824964864/nine-out-of-10-of-the-world-s-children-are-out-of-school-what-now

**Teal is a color that represents a stage of development according to Ken Wilber’s integral theory, which is described for organizations in Reinventing Organizations by Frédéric Laloux. It describes a new paradigm for how we create systems (such as organizations) based on human needs and motivational factors, and how to best manage complexity. In simple terms, we can say that we move from the idea of systems as machines towards seeing systems as living organisms.