California & the Child Mind Institute

Helping parents and caregivers feel confident navigating everyday emotional ups and downs — while building strong, resilient relationships.

• The Challenge: Parenting advice is often overwhelming, inconsistent, or hard to apply in real life. Too much of it lacks evidence, cultural relevance, or accessibility — making it difficult for many families to find what actually works.
• Our Solution: Co-designed with insights from 40 clinical experts, 1,000 caregivers, and 100 youth, PPTK offers what families need most: short, culturally responsive videos and printable tips in English and Spanish. Topics include managing meltdowns, navigating screen time, and supporting emotional regulation during challenging moments.
• What’s Already Taking Shape: With over 3 million views, families are using these tools in their everyday lives — at dinner, bedtime, or in tough parenting moments. Feedback from parents shows the guidance to be relatable, trustworthy, and actually usable.

Every child deserves to learn coping skills at school — just like reading, writing, and math.

• The Challenge: Teachers see students’ emotional needs firsthand but often lack the time or training to integrate mental health into routine learning activities.
• Our Solution: HMTK provides free, bilingual videos and worksheets that slot easily into any lesson plan. No prep or expertise required.
• What’s Already Taking Shape: Over 1.7 million students in California have used HMTK. Teachers report improved emotional vocabulary and stress management among students — and a growing demand for more resources.

Teaching digital-era mental health skills, so students can navigate tech, emotions, and support beyond the classroom.

• The Challenge: Teachers want to support student well-being but often lack time, training, and funding — many even pay out of pocket for basic supplies.
• Our Solution: Through a partnership with DonorsChoose, educators access short, engaging lessons on healthy tech habits, journaling, mood tracking, and finding readily accessible support during times of distress and crisis. In return, teachers receive up to $800 in classroom credits, making it easier to teach these life skills.
• What’s Already Taking Shape: In the first three months, nearly 700 teachers per lesson, reaching 20,000+ students, are helping kids better understand their emotions and digital lives while getting much-needed classroom resources.

Offering youth a private space to reflect — with encouragement and connections when support is needed most.

• The Challenge: Young people often wrestle with overwhelming thoughts, but most digital platforms aren’t built to support their mental health needs.
• Our Solution: Mirror is a digital journaling app — built by clinicians — that empowers youth to express themselves freely in a confidential space. It seamlessly provides entry summaries and insights, detects signs of distress, and connects users to real-time support, all while keeping entries private and stored only on their device.
• What’s Already Taking Shape: In less than three months since launching in March 2025, nearly 80,000 reflections have been submitted in Mirror. Its innovative risk detection has provided timely insights for thousands of distressing entries, with hundreds of young people connecting to help through the app at the moment they needed it most.

Bringing evidence-based therapy to teens through gamified tools that motivate action and fit their digital lives.

• The Challenge: Brief Behavioral Activation (BBA) is an empirically validated, efficient therapy for depression that helps teens improve mood by re-engaging with meaningful activities. Yet like many therapies, its delivery has often been paper-based and cumbersome, and many providers remain unfamiliar with the approach.
• Our Solution: We developed engaging e-learning modules to train a wide range of providers — from licensed clinicians to certified wellness coaches — in BBA. We then introduced Kandoo, a gamified mobile app that brings this therapy to life through companion-driven gameplay that motivates and rewards participation. Providers can track progress through an online dashboard offering real-time insights.
• What’s Already Taking Shape: Clinical validation is underway. Early results show strong engagement among both youth and providers, helping translate a proven therapy into a scalable digital format.

Empowering young people to design digital interventions that support mental health and well-being in a technology connected world.

• The Challenge: Most digital resources aren’t shaped by youth themselves, often missing what young people truly need for positive online experiences.
• Our Solution: California students — from high school to graduate levels — use our no-code platform to design brief digital tools to foster healthier and more intentional technology use, support stress management, and promote overall well-being.
• What’s Already Taking Shape: The inaugural challenge showcased students’ remarkable creativity and insight in designing digital interventions by youth, for youth. Winning projects are now being refined, validated, and prepared for broader use across California.

Shaping a future mental health workforce that truly understands and reflects the communities it serves.

• The Challenge: Financial barriers and lack of opportunity often prevent talented young people — especially from underserved communities — from pursuing careers in mental health.
• Our Solution: YMHA provides high school students with paid, hands-on training and internships in mental health care, research, and communications. Students gain mentorship, professional skills, essential resources (like laptops), and certifications (e.g., Adolescent Crisis Response), creating clear pathways to impactful careers.
• What’s Already Taking Shape: Over 2,500 students have joined YMHA. Participants report greater confidence (97%), feel well-supported (98%), and show increased intent to pursue mental health careers (82.9%). The diverse mental health workforce of tomorrow is being built today.

Challenging global data scientists to use shared data to solve pressing questions in youth mental health.

• The Challenge: Critical insights often remain hidden in isolated datasets, and promising discoveries can take years to impact young people’s lives.
• Our Solution: Through Kaggle, a global data science platform, we invite experts worldwide to tackle urgent youth mental health questions. We provide fully de-identified datasets for challenges — like identifying risks linked to problematic internet use or detecting body-focused repetitive behaviors via wearable data — empowering diverse teams to test new ideas and accelerate innovation.
• What’s Already Taking Shape: Over 5,000 teams worldwide have contributed to our challenges, generating novel insights, validating new tools, and helping shape more personalized, effective support for youth mental health.

Generating solutions through expert conversations on data, ethics, and digital life’s effect on young people.

• The Challenge: Teen mental health challenges are rising, but accurate data on tech’s role remains elusive. We urgently need to identify research barriers and drive policy solutions for the digital age.
• Our Solution: Our webinar series convenes experts in research, policy, youth advocacy, tech, and funding to explore key questions — from social media’s effects to ethics, data access, and public policy. It aims to break research barriers and pave the way for meaningful change, culminating in our Technology & Youth Mental Health Report.
• What’s Already Taking Shape: We’ve hosted 4 expert panels, 1 youth panel, and 6 interviews. These conversations highlight urgent challenges and reveal actionable paths toward better research, policy, and youth well-being. The forthcoming Technology & Youth Mental Health Report will synthesize these insights into a landmark resource for shaping a healthier digital future.