MBA's Mission
MBA’s mission has 4 components:
1. DIRECT SERVICE
At MBA, our core purpose is to inspire and awaken the intrinsic value of young people. We accomplish this through groundbreaking, mindfulness-based direct service work that empowers youth with the tools and competencies to overcome trauma, transform negative behaviors, and find real freedom from the inside. MBA’s curriculum provides at-risk youth with concrete tools to reduce stress, impulsivity and violent behavior and increase self-esteem, self-regulation and overall well-being. MBA’s classes are based upon a proprietary synthesis from best practices in meditation, movement arts, group-process modalities, peer counseling, and social and emotional learning models. Our goal is to give at-risk youth access to transformational tools and competencies in a language and through metaphors relevant to their contemporary urban experience. MBA is at the cutting edge of developing evidence-based mental training-driven rehabilitation interventions in youth vernacular: training that is relevant to youth’s lives.
We also serve those who serve youth by providing trainings, workshops, and facilitation to youth service providers, Probation staff, and other agencies to help them overcome their own trauma and internalized oppression, develop mindfulness and stress-reduction skills, and augment emotional competencies.
2. RESEARCH, EVALUATION & DISSEMINATION
MBA performs extensive evaluation of our interventions to develop the evidence-base for the efficacy of our programming and mindfulness-based interventions in general. We also work to disseminate information about our research, and other research in the field to build a national case for the use of mindfulness and emotional competence-building tools with at-risk and adjudicated youth. Current research priorities include a pilot project with the Pediatric Advocacy Program of Stanford Medical School to measure the effects of our new daylong mindfulness intensive for youth in long-term detention. To our knowledge, the program, which is currently being piloted in San Mateo County, represents one of the first instances where a juvenile probation department has allowed intensive/retreat-style mindfulness practice into one of their facilities. MBA is also currently partnering with Children’s Hospital & Research Center Oakland (CHRCO) on a pilot project that utilizes MBA’s intervention as a prescription for anxiety and insomnia for youth in detention. This partnership represents the first time adolescent physicians in the U.S. juvenile probation system have written formal medical prescriptions for mindfulness training.
3. ADVANCING THE FIELD
MBA advocates for the development of the new field of mindfulness-based rehabilitation through education, advocacy, and coalition-building work regionally and nationally. Locally, we work to strengthen the coordination and supports between youth-service providers to help make the sector more robust and create a stronger safety-net for the youth we serve.
4. NEW NATIONAL MODEL
MBA is actively positioning itself to become a new national model for adapting mindfulness and emotional literacy programming to the needs of at-risk, gang-involved and incarcerated youth. In 2008, MBA’s Alameda County Incarcerated Youth Initiative was one of 20 projects from a pool of 140 applicants advanced to final round funding consideration for $1 million in funding from the Local Funding Partnerships of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a national competition that seeks to discover innovative healthcare models serving under-resourced communities that the foundation believes have the potential to become new national models. The Johnson Foundation said that, with respect to program innovation, MBA’s model was “off the charts.”
In 2010, MBA formed a partnership with the National Council on Crime & Delinquency and Colorado State University with the goal of conducting some of the first longitudinal research on the effects of mindfulness-based programming on at-risk, violence-prone youth.
Images (top to bottom): MBA class, San Mateo Youth Services Center (2010); MBA instructor Amutabi Haines; MBA instructor Ripa Ajmera teaching; Youth in MBA’s program, San Mateo County Youth Services Center (2010); Youth in MBA’s program after being released from detention (2008)
