We are truly fortunate to have volunteers who come in and work hands-on with our kids, making sure they have the support and resources they need to thrive. This month, we’re spotlighting a special new volunteer who has been leading our ASP kids and CAC teens in valuable social-emotional learning workshops: Sarah Gazaway from Georgia State University’s HAPPI Lab!
Sarah Gazaway is a third year doctoral student in the counseling psychology program at Georgia State, and she has been a part of the HAPPI Lab since 2017. For the past few months, Sarah has been leading positive psychology workshops tailored to both our café teens upstairs and our ASP kids downstairs. These workshops are designed to introduce our kids to the idea of practicing positive psychology as a way to improve their social and emotional health!
“My goal in partnering with YELLS is, in those short amounts of time that we have together, to try to create a practical application of some positive psychology practices, be it gratitude, or humility or forgiveness, that they can practice during the week, either with fellow peers, with their family, or even at their school. And it really rounds it down into how you actually do it and practice it together,” Sarah said.
The HAPPI LAB
The HAPPI Lab, a.k.a the Humility and the Advancement of Positive Psychology Interventions Lab, was founded by Sarah’s advisor, Dr. Don Davis, with the intention of helping students develop expertise in positive psychology while also researching the benefits that positive psychology can have on people’s wellbeing. Sarah describes positive psychology as “the study of the good life”; strengths-based approaches to living that can help us all develop more meaningful lives! Through this lens, Sarah and the HAPPI Lab began doing outreach to help take what they were learning in the research realm and apply it to different populations. This ultimately led Sarah to connecting with YELLS, where she has since led different workshops for our kids based on their scientific research.
It’s been amazing to see how our kids have engaged with Sarah’s workshops over the weeks! In one of her lessons, Sarah taught our kids about how to identify positive character strengths in each other, and she adjusted her lesson plan to fit the needs of the teens upstairs and the smaller kids downstairs. Her workshop with the teens was casual and conversational, whereas with the ASP kids her lesson was more structured and high energy, but both workshops got our kids thinking about what it means to possess these character strengths. In another workshop, Sarah talked about how showing gratitude can play a meaningful role in our kids’ happiness and facilitate conversations that strengthen their relationships with family and friends.
“There’s such power in relationships,” said Sarah. “And really relationships where there are mentors, people who can regularly speak into the lives of these kids to say, ‘Here are the strengths I see that you have, and here’s how I see you doing that’, and guiding them, like scaffolding approaches to help them see how they can use those strengths to take a step towards a life that they want to live.”
“And yet also,” Sarah continues, “I’m presenting content, especially for the high schoolers, that’s actually pretty deep in nature, and not what they usually do. In the gratitude workshop, for example, they’re not usually talking about who’s meant something in their life, and then writing a letter to that person that they may intentionally give to them; that can feel really uncomfortable. So I am definitely pushing them early. And I’ve appreciated any of the space that they’ve allowed that to happen. So I try to not take that for granted.”
As our relationship with the HAPPI Lab continues to grow, Sarah said she’s looking ahead towards expanding the HAPPI Lab’s reach in the community. The HAPPI Lab is developing a content team that Sarah said will create more formalized positive psychology workshops designed for specific age groups and organizations. This team will soon begin creating understandable and entertaining content for all of our YELLS kids, from the kindergarteners to our high schoolers, that aligns with the YELLS principles while still maintaining the freedom to teach this information in the best way possible. Sarah’s hope is to one day go even further by developing positive psychology workshops for our parents as well, as she feels that these practices are most effective when the whole family is engaged with the ideas she’s teaching at YELLS.
“One of the things that’s really great is that I really feel like this partnership is one where I’m just helping bolster that which is already happening at YELLS. That YELLS mission really is a strengths-based model, one of servant leadership, one of helping grow these students to utilize their strengths to serve the community, and in that way, to thrive as individuals. And so that’s wonderful. That’s really what we’re about. So it was a really easy ‘yes’ for me when Laura came and asked, ‘Do you want to partner with us?’, because we really believe in what YELLS was doing.”
Thank you so much to Sarah and the HAPPI Lab for bringing these important positive psychology workshops into YELLS! We look forward to continuing this partnership and seeing how our kids begin to use some of what they’re learning in Sarah’s workshops in their own lives!
