R. E. A. L. is a student-based initiative, to help create deep, lasting relationships, and acquire the tools necessary for academic and career success.
Social Emotional Learning is used by Fortune 500 companies to educate their corporate executives for success.
Objectives:
- To support student throughout college life
- To learn and discuss the skills needed in order to develop and maintain healthy relationships, present and future success
- To provide the tools and skills that help develop self-esteem and independence
- To create a community of individuals committed to supporting each other as they face various issues and struggles during their college years and beyond
Methods:
- Weekly meetings of R.E.A.L., with occasional Guest Speakers and more formal presentations
- Exercises / Tools that teach how to create goals and visions
- Exercises / Tools that teach powerful communication
- Exercises / Tools that improve and deepen all relationships
Discussions of how various tools can be applied to your life
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THDC - College Program Grant Proposal for the John Templeton Foundation.
The Human Development Company
Grant Submission
John Templeton Foundation
Please provide us with a descriptive project title. Please limit your response to 150 characters, including spaces and punctuation.
Student-facilitated, college campus club REAL, enhances self-love, self-support, self-esteem, ensuring students relationship and career success. (144)
Please provide an executive summary of your proposal. The summary should highlight the strategic problem or opportunity you intend to address, the main activities of your proposed project, including any innovative approaches, and the anticipated concrete outputs and outcomes. Please limit your response to 1,300 characters, including spaces and punctuation.
At the Human Development Company (THDC), we see a systemic lack of love as pervasive in modern life, and the starvation for affection and support felt by many manifests to particularly deleterious outcomes at the college level. College students, often away from home and support for the first time, are in the process of transformation into adults, are learning about themselves, and establishing patterns of living that will often last throughout their lives. Amidst all this change, college students are often desperate for the skills that will allow them to establish new and valid sources of love.
REAL (Relationships, Education, Awareness, Loving Behavior) is the brainchild of THDC college interns, who upon discovery of our approach to human development, became convinced that this was exactly the kind of program college students across the nation needed. It is a program of study, exploration, community and outreach situation on college campuses. Our proposal is to implement such a program by first training 100 interns on 100 college campuses, and later extending our training to resident advisors. Through this program, we expect to see major improvements in participant self-esteem, interpersonal relationships, and ability to succeed academically.
Please describe the program or project for which you are seeking support. What activities are involved in the project? Who will be involved (as co-investigators, co-organizers, speakers at a conference, judges, etc.)? What core questions or hypotheses do you plan to explore, including any possible “Big Questions”? Please limit your response to 4,000 characters, including spaces and punctuation.
What is love? Is it possible to love unconditionally and teach people how to do it? Why is this important? Thirty years ago, Stefan Deutsch hypothesized a new theory of human development, which has begun to be validated by researchers such Fredrickson of U. of N. Carolina. One of the core tenets of this theory is that human beings experience pain when they are deprived of love, an insight that was unanimously validated by other people’s collective experiences. In his practice, Mr. Deutsch saw that people understood the need for unconditionally loving behavior, and accepted nothing less. Here, unconditional love is used to indicate love given consistently, regardless of circumstances, whereas conditional loving behavior is predicated on being pleased with others. Teaching people to become more aware of conditional behavior in themselves and those around them, and showing how to ask for love in a non-blaming manner healed over 90% of the marriages he worked with.
Interns apply to THDC by the hundreds each semester. They are screened and, if accepted, participate in a yearlong internship that trains them to become group facilitators. They begin by learning the tenets of The Continuum Theory of Human Development, and compare this theory to other human development theories and psychotherapeutic interventions. The theory stresses the importance of behaving unconditionally and considers this to be the necessary factor many of us search for because we so desperately need it. The theory points to awareness, the ability to envision, and high-quality communication as additional tools needed to self-actualize.
While learning the theory, interns begin the process of engaging and enrolling fellow students into REAL. They fill out the necessary Student Affairs paperwork to start a campus club, and in some cases find a faculty advisor. They learn to become more aware of their thoughts and actions, especially their automatic, conditional behavior. They also begin to create goals for their own growth, their future careers, and their relationships. Communication skills – particularly listening skills – are learned and practiced.
Most importantly, they are introduced to the concept that love contains energy necessary for human beings to thrive. Love is the nourishment that all human beings need to provide for themselves and others. The consequence is that conditional, unloving behavior becomes unacceptable. The first application of this tenet is learning self-love and self-efficiency. Because most students experience conditional behavior in their childhoods, even from well-intentioned parents, and more conditional behavior from friends, schoolmates, and other adults, they also learn to behave conditionally towards themselves. We consider it to be “anorexia-of-the-spirit.” This deprivation of love manifests severely, and sadly.
Most students come into campus life without the proper tools to help them grow and succeed as self-loving individuals. Transitioning from home to college life can leave many feeling alienated and anxious as they try to fit into the social life on campus. REAL helps to fill the gaps in their experience by helping them learn about themselves, find support within the greater community, and become self-actualized young adults.
Facilitation training is done through video conferencing, webinars, and onsite. Our College Program has attracted a number of bright and eager interns who see the need for REAL on their various campuses and are motivated to go through the steps it takes to begin their own club.
Why is the proposed project important relative to the current state of knowledge in your field or across fields? Please limit your response to 1,000 characters, including spaces and punctuation.
While THDC has spent 30 years of successful work using the theory of unconditionally loving behavior, the hypotheses that love is nourishment has only recently been validated by research. In Love 2.0 Barbara Fredrickson, Ph.D. recently published her eight years of research that shows conclusively that loving energy is a nutrient. No one else has developed or implemented programs based on this concept. Our K-12 program, therapists training program and college program are all based on this knowledge, and as such we’re thought leaders in the field of applied loving energy. Practicing psychotherapists have used our concepts with a 90% healing success rate. The concepts and psychotherapeutic applications have been presented and taught at such prestigious conferences as The Brief Therapy Conference, The International Society for Psychotherapy Research Conference, Adult Development Conference and many others, where the overwhelming majority of attendees requested copies of the course.
Please explain how you (the applicant, the project team, and/or the organization(s) connected to the proposed project) are positioned to carry out the proposed activities with distinction and a high standard of excellence. Please limit your response to 1,000 characters, including spaces and punctuation.
The leader of the project, Dr. Roberta Karant, recipient of Stony Brook University’s Excellence in Teaching Award, worked with a student population where she implemented a human development minor at The Eisenhower Living Learning Center. Dr. Karant was the Faculty Director of this highly successful Residence Life Program.
Kathryn Reed, M.M. ATCL, Adjunct Professor and Program Development Specialist, The University of Texas, Dallas with 25 years experience in education, business development and organizational strategies.
THDC was founded by Stefan Deutsch, philosopher and psychotherapist. As founder and Executive Director of Impact On Hunger, Inc. it became the educational umbrella arm of the U.S. hunger community and included the U.N.
Our work with loving energy is enthusiastically supported by dozens of professionals giving hundreds of hours each month. (828)
Outputs are the specific, quantifiable work products that you will create during the project. Examples include but are not limited to: academic papers submitted for publication, book manuscripts, conference proceedings, training sessions, curricula, prize competitions, films, events, and publicity campaigns.
Please describe the expected outputs of your project. Please limit your response to 1,000 characters, including spaces and punctuation.
The program hopes to produce the following outcomes over the course of three years:
- 300 trained REAL facilitators on 300 campuses. These programs should allow us to reach over 15,000 college students annually.
- A complete facilitator’s program manual, complete with PowerPoint and video lessons, and a complete array of teaching tools.
- A Resident Life manual, distributed to 50 colleges, to train approximately 2,500 Resident Advisors, with a cumulative reach of 50,000 students.
- The culmination of the two years’ experience working with thousands of students at different levels and in different situations will be compiled into a complete curriculum on human development. This will be added to existing programs once complete.
- Using data that will be continuously and conscientiously collected from day one, we will publish and present any significant findings in academic journals and at relevant conferences.
The Foundation is very interested to learn about your hopes for this project. Describe your vision of the realistic and beneficial long-term changes that could result from your work. Please limit your response to 1,000 characters, including spaces and punctuation.
By teaching students about the power of unconditional love and its nurturing attributes, we develop human beings who have the real potential to self-actualize. Our hope is to see every campus benefit from a REAL club and our Residence Life training program. We believe this project has the potential to bring to colleges and universities a crucial awareness of attending to their students’ social and emotional needs. This is necessary for greater personal and career success and satisfaction. This work will enable students to focus more on their school work and achieve better academic results while enjoying more fulfilling relationships.
Our vision includes a 3-year plan for this project. Year one: establishing campus clubs. Year two: based on the campus club results, write and deliver a Resident Life Program to colleagues and universities. Year three: Based on the campus and Resident Life programs, write a new course on human development to be taught nationwide in the social sciences. (991)
Please provide us with the amount of funding you are requesting from the Foundation. Please round to the nearest dollar, euro, or pound, and do not use symbols or punctuation.
$325,000
Please provide the total amount of funding necessary for the implementation and completion of the project. This amount may be equal to or greater than the amount of funding you are requesting from the Foundation. Please round to the nearest dollar, euro, or pound, and do not use symbols or punctuation.
Program Director 90,000
Administrator 60,000
Ad asst 40,000
(pt) Statistical analyst 15,000
Accounting 10,000
Office space 17,000 (includes utilities)
Travel 25,000 (10 trips to universities all over the country)
Program materials 10,000 (graphic design, printing)
Website 10,000
Equipment 5,000
Phone 3,000
A&O 40,000 (15% of overall)
TOTAL $325,000
The Foundation favors projects that have leveraged additional funding from other sources. Please provide us with the names of up to five additional sources of funding for this project. For each potential source, please list the amount of funding you have secured or are requesting and the status of your request. We do accept high-quality proposals that identify the John Templeton Foundation as the only potential funder. Please limit your response to 1,000 characters, including spaces and punctuation.
Apple Computer - $50,000
Citizen Watch Company – $50,000 –
J.P. Morgan Chase - $50,000 –
The Elsa Jewelry Corporation - $11,000
Professional volunteers – In-kind services to the project - $250,000 yearly