ProSocial
Schools

We are a global community of students, teachers, administrators and education professionals. We welcome you - and all school community members, including staff, neighbors, parents, guardians and grandparents - to join us.

Together we're improving our lives and communities through the power of schools and youth

"

We're helping facilitators and students focus on meaningful dimensions of school improvement.

"

Dustin Eirdosh

Germany

What is a ProSocial School?

A ProSocial School is a catalyst for understanding and improving the conditions for effective learning communities - within their school, throughout their neighborhoods, and in partnership with diverse peers around the world - to equitably meet the needs of all while rapidly adapting to local and global improvement aims.

Map and conceptual framework courtesy of OECD Focus Group 2B and OpenEvo.

How we make an impact:

Following your lead, we partner together to answer three key questions.

At the heart of these questions we center equity as an organizational system to overcome the

Diversity Paradox

To connect it all together, we offer toolkits to open up three critical pathways:

↔ Flexibility pathway

↔ Cooperation pathway

↔ Cognitive pathway

Our Leading Questions

What measures of development are relevant for understanding community success towards improved well-being, prosociality, and community-selected cultural evolution?

For whom, when and where do certain understandings of racial stigma - including its history, development, and function - lead to effective, community-led efforts to reverse structural racism socially, economically, legally and politically?

What conceptions/intuitive theories do practitioners have regarding community engagement?

Which attributes of educational interventions support the development of teachers’ interdisciplinary pedagogical content knowledge related to concepts and methods for positive cultural evolution?

Which methods allow teachers to reliably and efficiently assess their students’ wellbeing in classroom contexts?

Which attributes of [intervention X] can support [needs and outcomes X]?

How does [intervention X] influence [Outcome Y]?; How effective is [intervention X] in improving [Outcome Y]?

Which attributes of educational contexts and of stakeholders hinder and favor the implementation, adaptation, integration, and spread of educational innovations?

“Which attributes of educational innovations hinder and favor the implementation, adaption, integration, and spread across educational contexts?”

Our services and (free) resources

About us

Who we are

We are a global community of students, teachers, administrators and education professionals.

We believe that successful communities are made up of highly cooperative groups of people, subject to cultural traits that can be learned and elaborated in ways that are unique to each group.

Nadia Sandi

Belgium

Nadia Sandi is social change senior leader with more than 20 years of cross-sectoral experience in three continents. She’s constantly reimagining, co-creating and interweaving with different partners and collaborators to cultivate and nurture the soil of our coevolution in this great transition towards a regenerating self, society, and planet. In 2021, she co-founded Thriving Children Everywhere, an initiative initially created to democratize access to thrivability capabilities and experiences to all children in the world, and co-steward learning ecosystem transformation in the process. Prior to that, Nadia was an advisor at the World Bank’s Innovation Labs and Youth in Development program, as well as worked on its private sector development issues for the Africa region. She also oversaw the International Finance Corporations investments valuations. Nadia reconnected with her passion at Ashoka, where she was the director of project management and integration at Ashoka’s Changemakers. Earlier in her career, she also worked at private business consulting, investment banking as well as in executive education. Nadia serves as a mentor and a judge for social innovation ventures as well as supports Advisory and governance councils. She is an avid lifelong learner and part of many learning circles and communities of practice including the Weaving Lab, EUSG Governance masterclass, the Ubuntu Circle, ULab 2x and Regenerators Academy.

Ben Spaloss

United States

My mission is to facilitate and organize a network of Self-Determined, Prosocial Youth to lead change initiatives in their local areas, niches, and communities. I have been with Prosocial Youth and World for about 18 months now. I am also coauthoring a book with Mavis Tsai on emotional support for the everyday person. I am a very avid member of the Association of Contextual Behavioral Science and student.

Diana Singh

Poland

Diana has a Master's degree in Psychology with a focus on psychological flexibility in community music. She has worked as a teacher at an international American school in Warsaw, Poland for 4 years, private tutor for 16 years (Math, English, various subjects in English),and traditional Brazilian drums teacher (Samba).

Liz Rosario

United States

Dominican, New York native passionate about children's education and changing the world (they go hand in hand).

Susi Hanisch Ph.D.

Germany

Susi sampled a range of career paths - including tourism, geography, and agriculture. Since she completed her PhD in tropical agricultural science in 2015, she decided to make one more and (probably) final career switch into education, when she was exposed to and mind-blown by evolutionary theory and contextual behavioral science. Together with her husband Dustin, she founded the non-profit organization Global ESD, and the German counterpart EvoLeipzig. She now works as a teacher educator and education researcher at University of Leipzig, Germany, and is a guest scientist at the Max Planck Institute for evolutionary anthropology in Leipzig.She is a member of the Cultural Evolution Society, the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science(ACBS), and the German-speaking ACBS. In 2019 she completed the Prosocial Facilitator training.

Alex Herwix

United States

Before starting my PhD at the University of Cologne, I have studied Information Systems at the University of Paderborn as well as the Queensland University of Technology as well as worked as software developer for a few years. I am pretty deep into philosophy of science, design science research, pragmatism, responsible research and innovation, and effective altruism.

Julian Wong

United States

I am a corporate attorney at a clean technology company based in the Bay Area, California, and passionate about the rethinking of pre-K through 12 education design around the core tenets of dep ecological consciousness, civic participation, and ethics. My professional background is in finance, law, climate and energy policy, and new economic thinking.

Alison Malisa

United States

Alison is on a moral mission to re-design the way we teach economics by taking a multi-cultural, trauma-informed, heart-based approach to learning how to develop Prosocial Skills that optimize our co-creative capacity to design economic ecosystems for peace, prosperity, regeneration, and wellbeing for all. Alison is passionate about supporting a youth-led movement, training and supporting teachers, and helping schools to prioritize, achieve, and measure student wellbeing.

Putting it all together

Our Mission

To catalyze school improvement with the same design principles needed to achieve social, economic and environmental wellbeing on a planetary scale

Our Vision

A just, resilient and inspired world grounded in cooperative learning communities, and empowered by the evolutionary science of human behavior

Our Values

• Empowerment
• Efficacy
• Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
• Autonomy & Coordination
• Integrity

Process of

Community-Based Cultural Evolution

Eirdosh, D. & Hanisch, S. (in review). A community science model for interdisciplinary evolution education and school improvement. Chapter in Reydon & Huneman (2022) Evolutionary thinking across disciplines.

Our Intention

We hypothesize that helping school practitioners identify, compare, and co-evolve Theories of Improvement can become a driver for normative prosocial goals in any context.

Capturing impact

What evidence of our impact will we see?

  1. Improved (scientifically adequate and adaptive) understandings of human behavior

  2. Progress toward community selected aims and outcomes

  3. Improved well-being and prosociality