The Challenge Success Mission

MISSION We work with schools, parents and youth to develop and implement action plans to improve student well-being and engagement with learning. VISION Our current educational system and parenting practices are out of alignment with the well-documented needs of children. As a result, we are seeing rising and debilitating levels of emotional distress and educational problems. Experts are documenting high levels of anxiety disorders, depression, stress, disengagement from learning, cheating, and boredom. This is as true for the student struggling to pass the high school exit exam, as it is for the student who is overloaded with AP courses and extracurricular activities. Our culture’s current configuration of success is too narrow – focused primarily on a limited number of academic skills. In the world our students are about to enter, success comes in many forms. Without an appropriately broad notion of success, many students are working to the point of exhaustion, while many more are simply disengaging from a system that doesn’t address the diversity of skills, interests, and capacities that different children have. The tragedy is that many of these tolls on children are preventable. The Challenge Success vision is to develop a plan to prevent these tolls and allow all youth to thrive.