About the Empowered Program

Empowered focuses on adolescents in middle school, from the ages of 11 to 14 years old. Adolescence is a time of rapid change. These changes create a key window of opportunity for adolescents to explore who they want to be, what they want out of life, and how they want to be in their world. In other words, they are developing character.

The goal of Empowered is for youth to develop character traits that lead to a good life for them and their community—also called virtues. The program creates a structure for teachers to come alongside adolescents and provide scaffolding for their virtue development. 

Specifically, we hope that these modules, which can be implemented in any order, will prompt adolescents to explore how they can build a good life by living consistently with what we call big values—something bigger than what we can see that helps us hold onto who we can be. 
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These modules focus on

1. Promoting a sense of transcendent meaning (life purpose; what is valuable) through youths’ identification of their big values (like justice, family, friendship, faith, service); 
2. Building and practicing age-appropriate virtues of hope, wisdom, peace, and forgiveness through activities, stories, and discussion. 

We believe that adolescents already have the seeds of transcendent meaning, hope, wisdom, peace, and forgiveness, and that this intervention assists in the cultivation of those seeds.

Photos by Nick Fewings

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