Finding Balance

Youth are in the midst of a global mental health crisis and too few are able to cope with the normal stresses of life. The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated mental health challenges, particularly for communities of color, kids with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ youth, and families experiencing poverty. Left untreated, mental health problems will interfere with learning, self-esteem, confidence, socialization and other essential aspects of human development. Without a scalable, comprehensive, science-based mental health intervention, the crisis will likely worsen resulting in potentially devastating and life-long consequences for youth and their ability to thrive. 

For too long, mental health has been stigmatized and deprioritized leaving young people lacking emotional intelligence and without the resilience necessary to face intrapersonal, interpersonal, or academic challenges. Covid laid bare the extent of the mental health crisis, making clear that it is long past time to act, at scale, and to do so with a sense of urgency. 

The impacts of poor mental health are evident in classrooms across the country where students and teachers alike are struggling with focus, stress, anxiety, depression etc. Common interventions, such as socio-emotional learning (SEL) curriculum are passive, serve a limited audience, and have seen minimal success. Continuing to address a rapidly accelerating problem with antiquated tools will not result in the kind of meaningful and sustainable improvement that is essential. Unlike our passive counterparts, the Finding Balance platform and accompanying app leverages an active and engaging approach to empower youth to be agents of their own emotional intelligence experience.  

Create highly engaging and dynamic EQ and power skill building experiences for use in schools via the web-based Finding Balance platform. Alongside the suite of mental health technology tools, the digitally enhanced experiences will make mental health and bell-being fun and will help to destigmatize and prioritize mental health and well-being. Moreover, the EQ and power skill-building aspects of the solution result in 21st century workforce transferable skills. The social identity agnostic nature of the product will ensure everyone feels represented and included. 

The product serves youth, parents, and teachers. Youth often lack access to science based mental health and well-being technology tools that are inclusive and equitably address the needs of everyone. For LGBTQIA youth, URM youth, and youth in low-income communities these challenges profound. Creating accessible and inclusive systems that equitably meet the needs of all young people, is imperative to ensuring everyone has equal opportunity to thrive. 

Our team has a combined 50+ years of experience. We have a robust understanding of youth, their development, mental and physical health, complex challenges and ecosystem building and technology for good. 

Erin Carr-Jordan, Ph.D. is CEO of Five-11, Managing Director of the Digital Equity Institute, and Head of Social Impact at ASU. She has 17 years of leadership experience in education, mental health and human development. An equity evangelist, Dr. Carr-Jordan is an expert in architecting scalable solutions for at-risk populations. She sits on several boards including the Developmental Disabilities Advisory Council and AZ Special Olympics. She is Co-PI of grants from NASA/USAID, NSF, and philanthropic organizations. She is a signatory of the UN Global Compact, a Flinn-Brown Fellow, a member of UN Women and was a delegate at COP21. She holds a Master's in Human Development and a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from ASU, and an executive certificate from MIT.

Dr. Annissa Furr has an extensive background in immunology and microbiology and a deep knowledge of health, wellness, and scientific research. With over a decade of experience in higher education, she serves as an academic chair for graduate student research and has taught numerous graduate and undergraduate science classes to nursing and pre-med majors. She is a highly sought-after course writer and subject matter course/textbook development consultant. She has published in peer-reviewed journals, presented at academic conferences across the country, and served as a technical writer and a senior data analyst.

Mark Naufel, Ph.D. is an education innovator and a tech entrepreneur. He is the Executive Director of ASU’s Luminosity Lab, a premier innovation lab. His model for student-driven, interdisciplinary R&D is being establishing in the US and abroad. Mark advises university executives around the world and is advancing R&D projects for some of the world’s largest companies.

Cyndi Coon is a producer, writer, storyteller and rule-bender for good. She serves as the Chief of Staff at the Threatcasting Lab, a producer at ASURE (Applied Research Lab), Producing Director at the Weaponized Narrative Initiative and a special projects contractor for the office of the president at Arizona State University. She is a board member of the People Centered Internet, Volunteer Ecosystem Producer for the PCI Global Help Desk. She is the Founder and CEO of Laboratory5 Inc. Cyndi's role is to look at big wicked problems and insert opportunities for humans to collaborate.

Addressing poor mental health requires a sense of urgency and scale. Typically processes for going to market are insufficient and will leave young people around the world without access to they needed to be okay. Solve will provide the resources and mechanisms needed for our catalytic impact. 

Finding Balance takes a comprehensive approach to addressing the needs of youth (and everyone else).

Finding Balance takes a human-centered and science-driven approach to improving youth mental health and well-being. The easy-to-use suite of mental health technology tools leverage and intuitive interface as well as positive psychology and motivational theory to increase emotional intelligence and reinforce user emotional navigation behaviors. Designed using best practice in human development, our trauma informed, and inclusive approach engages youth via an interactive and accessible platform that is personalized and gender, age, and ability agnostic.

Finding Balance is designed to scale. Without additional development parents, teachers, counselors, and caregivers can use and equally benefit from the tools. Our community-responsive design ensures an equitable experience in rural, remote, tribal, and urban areas as long as there is access to the internet and a web-browser.

Protecting the privacy and the safety of our users is our top priority. To ensure the privacy of the kids and teens, we randomly assign generated access codes to parents or caregivers. No personally identifiable information will be shared with teachers and we will not obtain contact or health information for individuals.

Finding Balance features include:

Easy to identify mood emoji’s
Mood Journal
Mindfulness activities
Personalized Balance Score
Activity tracker
Sleep tracker
Data security
Easy-to-use features
Anonymized overview of class for teacher (Pulse)
Teachers and other staff can use
EQ Badges
Power Skills Badges
Gamification
Positive Reinforcement
Notifications
Easy to interpret daily, weekly and monthly analytics

Gamification encourages youth to take a personal interest in their own mental health. This interest translates into personal agency. The platform goes beyond simple tracking to help kids make the connection between how they are feeling and those things that are most impactful to overall health and well-being- including getting enough sleep, being active, and practicing mindfulness. The goal is for youth to be able to identify and name their own emotions, to start to understand their own patterns and triggers, to use a mindfulness practice to navigate challenges. The process of naming emotions is powerful. That identification is the foundation of emotional intelligence and emotional intelligence is the foundation for personal and professional success.

In the next year, through partnership development and meaningful community engagement, the suite of Finding Balance tools will be in use in at least 500 schools around the country. In those schools where Balance, including the newly developed EQ experiences, are integrated, youth will report marked mental health and well-being improvement including increased emotional intelligence and power skills. We expect teachers to report improved student engagement, increased agency, and capacity building around holistically meeting the needs of the students in their classrooms. Within 5 years, Finding Balance will be in use and improving the lives of over 1 million youth. The overarching goals is to improve quality of life and to position every youth person for personal and professional happiness and success. 

Year 1:  

Phase 1: 

• Identify at least 20 high need districts 

• Onboard users

• Launch V1 of the web version for Arizona learners and teachers

• Collaborate with teachers and administrators to determine equity focused KPIs

• Launch Monitoring and Evaluation 

Phase 2:  Year 2:  

• Identify additional districts

• Onboard new users

• Conduct UX assessments with users and teachers

• Continue customizing platform

• Build additional technical integrations and launch new partnerships

• Add EQ and power skill experience modules

• Expand mindfulness activities and recommendations

Year 3-5

• Identify additional districts

• Onboard new users to hit target goal of 1.15 million active students

• Continue UX assessments with users and teachers

• Continue customizing platform

• Build additional technical integrations and launch new partnerships

• Add EQ and power skill experiences

• Expand mindfulness activities and recommendations

• Complete monitoring and evaluation and equity and impact assessment

The Finding Balance team is well-versed in conducting research and will continue to use science-based monitoring and evaluation practices. The team is led by three Ph.D.'s who are trained in mixed methods research. The team will use various research tools to evaluate the project's impact, including quantitative surveys, qualitative interviews and focus groups, feedback loops, platform analytics. Additionally, the team will identify equity and impact focused KPIs in tandem with our stakeholders to ensure our measures of success are aligned with theirs. Further, we will measure improvements in students and teacher mental health and well-being, academic outcomes engagement, persistence, and sense of belonging as well as skills developed. 

Five-11 conducted a nationwide survey to assess and scope the mental health and well-being needs of youth. A stratified sample of parents, youth, counselors, and teachers participated. The results of that survey, as well as qualitative feedback from interviews and informal conversations, informed the development of the Finding Balance iOS app and laid the foundation for the web platform. Meaningful impact and success will be measured using our "Pulse" feature that allows teachers to see the overall mood of their class. Over time, we expect mood to improve and stabilize. Sucess will also be measured via badges earned. Badges, including Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and Power Skills are built using logic informed by student behavior in the app and platform. If youth are earning badges, we can assume that they are building skills.

Finding Balance is a suite of mental health technology tools including 1) an iOS app 2) an Android app, and 3) a web-based application for use at school and at home. A patented wearable is in development. To compliment the tools we plan to use funding to create a series of state of the art interactive emotional intelligence experiences for use in the classroom. The web-based version of Finding Balance will made with a relevant technology stack, leveraging React.JS and Node.JS. The experiences will be available in an LMS agnostic platform that can seamlessly integrate into any existing system or be used in places where no LMS is available.

Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging are woven throughout every aspect of Five-11 and Finding Balance. We are a women owned and led organization with a purposefully diverse advisory and development team. As a purpose-driven organization we are grounded in the belief that everyone regardless of age, socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, gender expression, or ability deserves equal opportunity to thrive. We take a deeply humble and community-responsive approach to design to ensure equity in the user experience. We ensure that all of the voices are at the table and are part of the conversation prior to making design decisions. We spent nearly two years gathering feedback from the community to make sure that what we created would be used because it is useful. Moreover, feedback loops are integrated throughout our model, and we have an agile development process to pivot as needed to ensure our users feel seen, heard, and represented. Our tools are personalized to meet the unique needs of each user.

As we build interactive experiences, we will co-create with a diverse advisory group taking into consideration all forms of social identity. Making the tool freely available to those who need it most, particularly youth in low-income and minoritized communities is of paramount importance. Evaluation of our progress and measures of success will include diversity and impact indicators.

Digital Equity is an increasingly important consideration. As communities who previsously lacked access get connected, we will partner with community and digital equity organizations to make our tools available. We have laid the groundwork for those efforts.

Finding Balance is designed to do the most amount of good, for the longest amount of time, for the largest amount of people. Paying particular attention to the needs of at-risk and vulnerable populations, the suite of technology tools is accessible via an ios and android app, a learning platform, and other social avenues. The model is built on the premise that co-creation iterative design ensure that we add value to the community and that our tools are used because they are useful. In addition to empowering youth and making connections between important constructs, we create ecosystems at school and at home where young people build agency, capacity, and workforce transferable skills. 

Finding Balance has a diverse approach to revenue generation including B2B, B2C, and funding from philanthropic and government entities. 

The team has successfully launched both ios and android apps and has earned a patent for the wearable. We have built deep partnerships to set the stage for full deployment and have the team in place to scale. The team has submitted as prime and sub to several granting organizations. Additionally, the team has raised funds to cover the preliminary cost of development.