Our Mission
Led by students establishing a bystander culture to stop bullying, Stand For Courage employs stories, creativity, and popular-culture for high-impact recognition inspiring relationships built on respect.
What We Do
We support youth leaders and adults by providing them with materials to Teach, Recognize and Reward.
TEACH
The Stand for Courage curriculum equips youth and adults with practical tools to prevent and respond to aggressive behavior. It’s designed for schools, community organizations, sports camps, and other youth-centered environments.
RECOGNIZE
Students and adults can nominate any youth in grades 6–12 who demonstrates courage. Nominations can be made through schools, camps, community organizations, or directly on our website. The program will expand to include youth of all ages.
We combine sustainable, evidence-based, community and school-focused educational programs with the power of pop culture and media to reward acts of courage with high-impact recognition.
We recognize that youth are harmed through destructive relationships and may heal in nourishing relationships. Stand for Courage is where pop culture and peer culture converge to make the positive difference.
Stand For Courage works with community organizations, camps, schools and other agencies to move toward the goal of empowering, engaging and educating youth.
REWARD
Stand for Courage winners receive meaningful rewards such as tickets to sporting events or concerts, a celebrity school visit, features on our website, and exclusive Stand for Courage gear.
WHY WE DO IT
Establishing a positive climate is first the responsibility of adults and leaders.
The tools of teaching, recognizing and rewarding create an environment where everyone is focused on the positive. Bullying is a community-wide pandemic with dramatic implications for our nation as a whole.
About 1 in 5 children (19.7 percent) reported having been teased or emotionally bullied in the previous year (US Department of Justice, Finkelhor et al., 2009) 7,066,000 students reported being bullied during the 2008-2009 school year (US Department of Justice, DeVoe & Murphy, 2011), the equivalent of nearly 40,000 students bullied every day of the school year.
There is a strong connection between bullying, being bullied and suicide, according to a study from the Yale School of Medicine (Kim, Y.S., Leventhal, B., 2008).
Peer abuse has considerable short and long-term impact on victims and bullies, as well as bystanders. It leads to low self-esteem, lack of motivation, violence, self-destructive behaviors, and tragically, even suicide. When the climate of a school or youth center implicitly or explicitly allows bullying behaviors it disrupts the learning process and increases stress levels within that environment. Without intervention, victims and bullies can grow up to perpetuate the cycle of dominance and submission.
1 in 5 children
(19.7 percent) reported having been teased or emotionally bullied in the previous year.
HOW WE’RE UNIQUE
We collaborate with local and national celebrities and other influential figures to celebrate and recognize acts of courage. By connecting youth with positive role models in their communities, we inspire them to build confidence and grow as leaders.
We use evidence-based practices—proven methods that create meaningful, lasting impact.
We partner with schools and educational institutions to develop research-based programs that foster inclusive, supportive environments free from peer abuse.
We also work alongside community organizations, camps, and other youth agencies to uplift, empower, and educate young people.
By promoting healthy, positive community cultures, Stand for Courage helps youth experience belonging and respect today—while shaping the kind of compassionate culture they’ll carry into the future.
WHY IT WORKS
All behavior has a motivation. If we want to change a behavior we must uncover the motivation and reverse the incentive. For example, researchers estimate that ninety percent of bullying is a result of wanting to get attention. To shift attention away from negative and toward positive Stand For Courage provides attention in the form of awards and recognition to those who are disrupting the cycle of bullying. This process is reversing the incentives.
Stand For Courage will disrupt the cycle of bullying using a science-based methodology of positive reinforcement to incentivize bystanders to “Stand for Courage.” We will teach youth how to stand up against bullying behaviors and then reward them using high-impact reward and recognition. Building on foundations of neurobiology, we encourage a shift away from standing by without taking action. We inspire youth to feel that it is cool to do the right thing and stand up against behaviors that disrespect and put down others.
This approach seeks to explicitly motivate bystanders. Bystanders possess a great deal of power to shift attention away from the negative and toward the positive.
