AVE launches HumanKind, a program developed in international partnership, for the integration of social-emotional education in schools in Romania

The Association for Values in Education (AVE) launches HumanKind, the social-emotional education program – SEL, through which teachers will be trained to support students in the optimal development of social-emotional skills. The program starts with a pilot, which included 12 public schools from Iaşi, Botoşani, Suceava, Dâmboviţa, Olt, Sibiu, Neamţ, Satu Mare and Ilfov counties. The initiative is being developed in partnership with MindUP™ | The Goldie Hawn Foundation and aims to expand nationally.

The first edition of HumanKind will take place between February 26, 2022 and June 15, 2023, with 12 schools in Romania. In the first 10 months of the project, the 60 teachers and 12 selected school principals will take part in intensive training courses, through training and mentoring sessions and will apply to the classroom the notions of social and emotional education learned. In other words, what the teachers, the parents and the children are about to experiment is not a try-out, nor an empirical thing, it’s a well researched and specialized program, with experts in psychology, mindfulness, neuroscience, whose mission is the dissemination of social-emotional education based on scientific evidence for more than 20 years.

“The program developed by AVE Romania together with MindUP ™ | The Goldie Hawn Foundation will contribute to the development of the adults of tomorrow, so that they can make decisions with responsibility, guided by kindness, compassion and empathy, both in their personal lives and at the level of their contribution to society”, says Radu Manolescu, co-founder and president of the board of AVE Romania.

The program is addressed in the first place to teachers, to learn how to understand themselves and self-regulate their emotions, and then to share their knowledge with the students, to transform boredom, fatigue, sadness and anger into positive emotions. In this way, children will learn to be self-aware, to have self-control and relational awareness, which will help them become better adults and well-centered humans in the future. The program is meant to change the DNA of the school, and it is not something to be done once, but daily, until the mindset starts to shift and it becomes a habit. Also, the program delivers some skills and tools that must be used beyond the class, the book or the curriculum, because the goal being to make a change inside, in order to expect brightness outside.

“We live in a time when the effects of stress and anxiety are increasingly felt by children around the world. That is why it is a joy for us to develop and implement in Romania, together with the Association for Values in Education, our MindUP program. Thus, we provide Romanian teachers with the tools to address issues related to children’s emotional health and development and help them develop harmoniously, with positive effects both in terms of academic results and in private life,” said Goldie Hawn, Founder and CEO of the Goldie Hawn Foundation.

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“Emotional health is extremely important, especially in the context in which, Romania included, the emotional instability of students is a frequently encountered phenomenon. Studies conducted by Casel.org showed that about 27% of students who went through a social-emotional education program improved their academic performance, and 24% of them felt less stressed. That’s why, in partnership with MindUP™ | The Goldie Hawn Foundation we bring to Romania a program through which we offer teachers the necessary tools to help them support children for a balanced long-term development”, said Anca Alexe, Social Emotional Learning Program Manager, within the Association for Values in Education.

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“To achieve good academic results, students need to be happy, and this is possible when they can manage their emotions correctly. Balance and well-being come from a harmonious relationship both with your own inner world and with what surrounds you. Otherwise, under conditions of stress and pressure, children will not be able to yield and will hardly progress. That is why it is essential to contribute to their development from a socio-emotional perspective. This is the only way they want to be successful both personally and professionally during adulthood, and through HumanKind we are glad that we are now able to work with teachers in Romania and intervene in their training”, Dido Balla, Global Director of Training and MindUP Relationships and trainer in the HumanKind program.