SAN DIEGO—Rhea Jain, a senior at Del Norte High School, says she has always known that she wants to pursue a career in healthcare after school. But it wasn’t until after completing her Girl Scout Gold Award project when she discovered a new avenue to empower others to practice healthy lifestyle habits.
As part of her Gold Award project—the highest honor a high school Girl Scout can earn—Jain created a series of workshops called Growing Strong Minds. Lessons focus on helping kids develop coping skills to manage stress, understand emotions, and communicate with confidence.
“Creating and leading these workshops showed me that education and prevention can have just as much of an impact as treatment,” Jain says. “I hope to carry those lessons with me into my future career by helping people not only when they need care, but also by giving them the knowledge and confidence to take charge of their own well-being.”
Through hours of babysitting, volunteering, or tutoring, Jain says she noticed that many kids experience emotions and don’t always have the tools to work through their feelings. She decided to create Growing Strong Minds as an answer to her observations, hoping that fun and approachable conversations at an early age would help kids before they reach middle and high school.
Since starting these lessons last year at Design39Campus, Jain has worked with more than 125 elementary school students on ways to understand and manage emotions in a healthy and positive way. She spent more than 100 hours researching child development, social-emotional learning, and age-level mental health education. Lessons were then created from scratch and refined over time using student and family feedback.
Workshops take on different themes, like “big feelings,” healthy coping strategies, and discovering personal strengths, and use activities like superhero-themed mask making and missions to keep students engaged.
“Every workshop is something I designed from the ground up, from the lesson plans and activities to the slides, worksheets, and take-home resources,” Jain says. “I learned that elementary students stay engaged when they're actively participating, so I built each workshop around games, creative projects, discussions, and hands-on challenges instead of long presentations. As the program grew, I continued refining each lesson based on what students responded to most.”
Jain expanded her project into a weekly series of workshops offered at the Boys & Girls Club of 4S Ranch this past summer, where she watched as students evolved from day one to the final lesson.
“At the beginning, some are quiet or hesitant to raise their hands, but by the end they're volunteering answers, encouraging each other, and proudly sharing what they've created, says Jain. “Seeing students who were initially unsure leave smiling and excited about what they learned reminds me why I started Growing Strong Minds in the first place.”
Feedback from parents and educators echo the positive experiences that Jain says she has observed during workshops.
“Parents and staff have shared that students looked forward to the workshops each week, continued talking about the activities at home, and practiced the coping strategies outside of our sessions. Seeing students return excited for the next workshop has been one of the best forms of feedback I could ask for,” says Jain.