UNLIKELY COLLABORATORS

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Unlikely Collaborators and Mindful Life Project Announce Transformative Project Bringing Mindfulness to Elementary and Middle Schools in Los Angeles Area

LOS ANGELES, May 23, 2024 -- Unlikely Collaborators and Mindful Life Project (MLP) have announced a transformative project that will bring a proven and successful school-based mindfulness programming that supports the mental and emotional health of the students, educators, and families to schools in the Los Angeles area. MLP has successfully scaled the organization into 13 cities across the San Francisco Bay Area, California Central Coast and the California Central Valley to serve over 75 schools a year, providing a foundation of mental and emotional wellbeing so that schools can go from historically stress-and trauma-inducing places to spaces of healing and empowerment for students, teachers and communities. Unlikely Collaborators has provided MLP a seed grant of $50K to both grow capacity to help scale the organization to Los Angeles as well as to launch programming in two Los Angeles area schools.

Unlikely Collaborators and Mindful Life Project (MLP) have announced a transformative project that will bring a proven and successful school-based mindfulness programming that supports the mental and emotional health of the students, educators, and families to two schools in the Los Angeles area. Unlikely Collaborators has provided MLP a seed grant of $50K to both grow capacity to help scale the organization. Photo Credit: Kaiser Permanente

MLP programs serve TK-8th grade students, their educators, and families in schools and school districts that have high poverty, violence, and intergenerational trauma – districts that also frequently lack adequate resources and programming to support the mental health of all in the educational ecosystem. The Los Angeles launch took place in early April at Aspire Titan Academy and Aspire Antonio Maria Lugo Academy.

"Schools can become places of belonging, compassion, and wellness when students and educators practice mindfulness," says Mindful Life Project founder and CEO JG Larochette. "Starting mindfulness in early education creates a habit of expanding Perception Boxes when a child is still developing. We're thrilled about our new partnership with UC to bring this vision to Los Angeles schools."

Said Elizabeth R. Koch, Founder of Unlikely Collaborators: "It's our heartfelt wish that this initial grant to MLP will spark a broader movement where mindfulness and introspection become foundational elements of educational systems, nurturing spaces of healing and empowerment for students, educators, families, and the entire community."

MLP has pioneered dynamic school-based mindfulness programming that supports the mental and emotional health of the students, educators, and families within a school community so that everyone in the school ecosystem is brought along a deeply impactful wellness journey. This model stands in contrast to training the teacher models, which place the onus of mastery and implementation of social-emotional learning on already overworked and often burned-out classroom teachers.

Unlikely Collaborators is a start-up with an ambitious but attainable mission: to untangle the stories that hold us back as individuals, communities, nations, and humanity at large. By asking sometimes contradictory but always consequential questions, we provoke powerful acceptance of self and others by helping people gain agency over their Perception Box^™.

To learn more about Mindful Life Project go to www.mindfullifeproject.org, and for more information about Unlikely Collaborators, please visit https://www.unlikelycollaborators.com/.