ABOUT US

Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health issue facing teenagers today, with nearly 1 in 3 adolescents struggling with some form of anxiety disorder during their lifetime (National Institutes of Health).  Drawing from his own experience with severe anxiety, Project GenZen’s founder, a 14-year-old at the time, established this community-focused effort to help destigmatize mental health challenges by bringing tailored mindfulness and meditation programming to charter schools, private schools, refugees, and inner-city students.  

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Our founder was fortunate enough to have grown up in a stable family environment and to be able to afford programs, such as Headspace and other similar platforms, to help deal with his anxiety, but knew that not everyone had that same luxury. Based on the profound impact that mindfulness tools had on managing his own anxiety, he successfully established a public-private partnership via Project GenZen to customize content from Headspace and to engage various community role models in order to improve mental health outcomes among various educational constituencies and socioeconomic backgrounds by providing them with advanced mindfulness programming free of charge.  Importantly, by tailoring the content to account for a variety of specific community stressors, and by engaging a diverse set of celebrities, athletes, and musicians to share their own struggles with anxiety and depression, Project GenZen seeks to eliminate the stigma associated with mental health matters that has prevented young adults from addressing their own challenges with anxiety.  In addition to Headspace, the Contemplative Sciences Center at the University of Virginia has been another great advocate for Project GenZen’s work and has worked in partnership to develop a comprehensive curriculum and a resource guide for high school students to help them  effectively cope with anxiety and various environmental stressors.  

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Project GenZen is also partnering with Andrew Heinrich, a former member of the faculty of the Yale School of Public Health, to leverage the group’s work to serve as a the basis for a research paper to be published on the reduction of stress and anxiety for those students and refugees families who incorporate meditation and mindfulness techniques into their daily routines.