What we do

We build the curriculum schools should be teaching, and we deliver it for free.

Rise to Wellness is designing, validating, and deploying the World Mental Health Curriculum: a comprehensive program that teaches children the practical skills to manage emotions, build relationships, and navigate life. Every part of our model is built so that no school has to choose between adopting it and balancing its budget.

The model

One curriculum. Four moving parts. Designed to scale.

Most school-based mental health programs fail at one of two points: they're too expensive for schools to adopt, or they have no way of proving they worked. Our model is built to clear both bars from day one.

Step 01

We develop and peer-review the curriculum

Six modules covering 30 evidence-informed life skills, written in-house and reviewed by outside academic researchers before deployment.

Step 02

Schools adopt at no cost

Schools and students pay nothing. The program is funded through grants, sponsorships, and community fundraising, never out of a school's budget, so no school has to wait for a budget cycle.

Step 03

Our trained educators deliver every lesson

We place a trained Rise to Wellness educator in the school to teach the curriculum, supported by lesson packets, one-page scripts, and printed workbooks and worksheets for the children. No teacher is asked to take on a new subject on top of a full workload, and every classroom receives the lessons the way they were designed. That consistency is also what makes our assessment results worth trusting.

Step 04

We measure outcomes, every child, every cycle

Pre- and post-assessment using validated psychometric instruments, for every cohort we teach, so schools and supporters see exactly what changed.

Why this model

Free for schools. Funded by communities. Owned by us.

Mental health curricula already exist. Most don't reach the children who need them most because schools, particularly in lower-income districts and developing countries, can't afford to buy them, train teachers, or carve out instructional time.

We solve this by removing every cost a school would normally bear. Adoption requires no purchase, no per-student license, and no extra budget. The work is funded through grants, sponsorships, and community fundraising. Our own trained educators deliver the curriculum, while the school provides the classroom and the instructional time. Everyone wins, and no school has to wait for a budget cycle.

Putting our own educators in the classroom is what protects the quality of everything else. Lessons are delivered the way they were designed, nothing gets piled onto a teacher's already full plate, and the outcome data we collect is clean enough to build real research on.

How we work with schools

One curriculum, delivered by our own educators.

When a school partners with us, we place a trained Rise to Wellness educator in the building to teach the curriculum ourselves. The school provides the classroom and the instructional time. We bring everything else: the educator, the materials, and the assessments. No teacher takes on a new subject, every lesson lands the way it was designed, and the curriculum stays free for the children.

The Embedded Educator model

We recruit and train our own educators, then place them in partner schools to deliver the curriculum directly, start to finish. Schools get a complete, ready-to-run program at no cost and with no added load on their staff. Children get lessons taught by someone trained for exactly this work. And because delivery is consistent in every classroom, the pre- and post-assessment results mean something, which is what makes it possible to prove the program works, cohort by cohort.

What's different

This isn't a workshop or an app. It's structural.

Compare what Rise to Wellness builds against the typical model for school-based mental health programs.

Most SEL programs

Reactive, fragmented, expensive

Single workshop or short series, often one-off
Schools pay per-student licensing fees
Existing teachers are asked to deliver SEL on top of their workload
Limited or no outcome measurement
Available only in well-resourced districts

Rise to Wellness

Preventive, sustained, free to adopt

A complete six-module curriculum covering 30 life skills
Always free to schools and students
Delivered by our own trained educators, held to fidelity standards
Pre/post psychometric assessment built into every cohort
Designed for global deployment, including low-resource settings

Where we're starting

Two pilot geographies. One curriculum. A proof-of-concept for everywhere.

We're deliberately starting in two very different settings, a high-income urban context and a developing-country context, to demonstrate that the program works across cultures and resource environments.

United States · Boston, MA

Our home base

Rise to Wellness is incorporated as a 501(c)(3) in Massachusetts. Boston gives us proximity to world-class research institutions we plan to approach for peer review and collaboration, and a dense network of community organizations that can host pilot cohorts. Our first pilot is a 12-week, community-based youth wellbeing program, sponsored by Northeastern Crossing and the Office of City and Community Engagement at Northeastern University.

A 12-week youth wellbeing pilot planned for fall 2026
Outreach to Boston-area academic reviewers
Proof of concept for U.S. school adoption

Pakistan · Urdu deployment

Our first partner school

In August 2023, our founder traveled to Karachi and got a verbal agreement with Hope, an NGO that runs schools and hospitals across Pakistan, to implement our curriculum at their Zia Colony school once development is complete. Only 1 of our 13 assessment scales has a validated Urdu version for ages 8-18, so the language work comes first: we're in discussions with research and translation teams about securing validated Urdu versions of the other 12.

In discussions with research teams on validated Urdu translations of our scales
Translation and validation of 12 psychometric scales into Urdu: 1 ready, 12 to go
Deployment to Urdu-medium schools once translated scales are validated

Students at a school in Karachi. Hope has agreed to implement the curriculum at their Zia Colony school once it's complete.

Daily practice

A child doesn't learn to read in a single lesson. Why would emotional regulation be different?

Our curriculum is delivered in regular short lessons across the school year, not as a one-off workshop or assembly. Each lesson combines short instruction with hands-on practice: worksheets, role-plays, pair work, group activities, and structured dialogues.

Foundational skills (naming emotions, basic communication, gratitude) anchor the curriculum throughout, and we work with each school to shape a program that fits its calendar and its students.

The result is something closer to how children actually learn: small inputs, daily repetition, gradually deepening complexity. Skills move from conscious effort to automatic habit.