How Bright Promises is Supporting Children's Recovery from COVID-19

During this time of recovery, one of the most important things that we can do to help restore children’s overall health and wellbeing is to support their mental health.

‍The children and youth that we serve continue to experience overwhelming amounts of stress and instability at school, at home, and in their communities. This chronic stress can lead to negative behaviors, mental illness and many other social, emotional and cognitive impairments. Working together, we can prevent these negative outcomes.

Children need help to manage and heal from the intense stress they have been experiencing for the last year. From the challenges of learning at home to widespread food and housing insecurity, the fear, anxiety, grief, and uncertainty that children are suffering has taken a significant toll.

Through our forward-thinking and cutting-edge programs, Bright Promises and our community of experts are working continuously to ensure the urgent needs of children, youth and their families are addressed. Bright Promises has the partnerships in place and knowledge of what programs work to support children’s emotional and mental health.
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Bright Promises remains dedicated to supporting the recovery of the more than 9,000 low-income children and youth that we serve in communities across Chicagoland.  ‍
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To support the recovery of Chicago's children and youth, Bright Promises is expanding our very successful SEL@Home: Social Emotional Learning at Home program. SEL (social emotional learning) helps children and families develop healthy, loving child-parent relationships, increases children’s school readiness and academic success, and promotes positive coping skills and appropriate cognitive development. These outcomes are crucial for children and youth to overcome many of the challenges created by the pandemic. Through an innovative collaboration with our program partners, we are increasing access to high-quality, culturally relevant SEL resources, expanding the infrastructure of SEL programs for parents, training professionals and community leaders, and designing resources for caregivers, their children and youth.
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Bright Promises has also launched a new, multi-year initiative, Healing, Leading, Changing, which addresses the impact of trauma caused by racism on children and youth. In recent years, both child-serving agencies and the public have come to recognize that childhood trauma, if left untreated, can cause life-long damage. What is less known is that witnessing or experiencing racism and discrimination can cause traumatic stress that impacts the physical and mental health and wellbeing of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color)children and youth. Through this new initiative, we are partnering with youth-serving organizations and empowering young people themselves to address race-based traumatic stress. Our goal is to mitigate the impact of ongoing trauma caused by racism and promote healing so that children and youth can live better lives and have brighter futures.

Please join us in supporting children and youth through these innovative and effective programs. Make your donation online here.

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