Today we’d like to introduce you to Jay Levin.
Hi Jay, so excited to have you with us today. For folks who missed our prior conversation, can you share your story and how you got to where you are today?
The story starts with me as a young NY journalist fascinated by everything that looked like it would make a positive difference in people’s lives and communities and the world. Whether it was personal, economic, political, social justice-oriented, creatively oriented, education-oriented, health-oriented, environmentally oriented or otherwise.
So I became the “alternative journalist” at a NY daily newspaper and covered all these areas of interest. Later I started the LA Weekly so I could bring that sensibility to Los Angeles. One of the areas we covered was the human development movement because of what had become for me two core beliefs.
One was that the world is an effect and the cause is how we are mal-trained to deal with our own inner and outer relational lives. The other belief was that almost all human suffering and conflict result from a lack of just exactly those learnable these skills that collectively form emotional and relating intelligence, and self-management.
Want to know why we have nuclear weapons pointed at our heads, why we may be on the verge of ecocide, why the Ukraine war is on, and why we have so much social and political pain in the country? Why history is so full of violence and exploitation between groups and individuals? The answer is Mal-training and mindsets and behavioral practices passed down through the generations. Bad character and pained behavior is an after-affect.
Here is a link to an audio talk I give laying it out step by step and which I encourage readers to think about your own development process as you listen to the talk called How and Why We Are Who We Are. https://www.youtube.com/
Summing up part of my story, I have run six media companies and started six nonprofits. The two most recent are EQuipOurKIds.org and the California Social Emotional Learning Alliance (SEL4CA.org) which now has 3100 educator members. The first is a national media advocacy campaign to get Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) in every prek-12 school, and the second is a grassroots activist campaign focused on the same goal in California.
Why these? Because of my belief that if we don’t teach the next generation or two way more conscious and effective ways of relating to themselves, others and life itself on a mass level, we are likely to blow ourselves out of existence with nukes or ecocide much of life out of existence. You have to willfully be in denial – as most of us are because we feel powerless against this background reality – not to understand the dangers of the moment and the overall mindset or paradigm that is running crucial human affairs.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
What’s a smooth road? We all have challenges from the limitations imposed on us by our overall education from parenting onward and the behaviors and mindsets imposed on us. We all have mirror neurons. I have made tremendous mistakes, managed myself poorly at times, have gotten down on myself. Mishandled some relationships that I certainly would have preferred not to. But we are here to learn and perfect our game as much as possible.
What’s our game? Basically learning by trial and error who we really are as creative, loving, from-God beings and how to get out of the way of our learned bullshit in a world that, on a sliding scale, takes us out of our true essence via its mal-training and often sh*tty behavior modeling. Think about how much human behavior is based on fear and how easily we are manipulated by fear mongers…
My essence I learned is seeking to unfold for others a next better step, whether I do it with journalism or with nonprofits like EQuip Our Kids!, which is in service to what I profoundly believe is the most important social as well as education movement in the world.
Universally and comprehensively adopted. SEL and its counterparts like Character Development Education have a chance to retrain young humans out of the mindsets and behaviors that have created most human misery and violence in history – individually and collectively – and which, to repeat myself, absolutely have us on the precipice of mass extinction.
Pop culture is a creative diversion – a forgetting, often healthy – from that reality. But if we get lost only in pop culture and our personal careers, how we gonna get out of that dilemma? Some degree of attention needs to be paid by all of us.
That’s a collective challenge and obstacle – not just mine. EVERYONE’S. That’s why I promote the idea that everyone should join us in supporting the SEL movement – as well as look to their personal development.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I am known for being a good journalist and creative editor with a combination of foresight and street smarts. Also for persistence. I am also known for taking on challenges, including as a social entrepreneur, that others might pass on and being just enough ahead of the curve to appeal to a large audience, as the LA Weekly did.
I am also known for needing a superb COO as my most important colleague.
So let me talk about our current challenge at EQuip Our Kids! as an example of my current work. I started this nonprofit with some pals who were business leaders in providing resources to underprivileged kids. We believed that they would benefit hugely from access to SEL life skills curriculum and school culture. Still, and crucially, we were aware that SEL needs to be universal learning.
Our first target was parent lack of awareness of SEL benefits and therefore demand for it – hence it was only comprehensively taught in a very small percentage of US schools. Six years later, there is more than 70% awareness and a high level of demand. We didn’t do that alone but in coordination with allies that we developed and provided media to. Bottom line: we played a significant role in that awareness and adoption growth.
Our current challenges are (1) the students themselves – there is no student SEL movement. And (2) lack of business and corporate support for SEL similar to how the corporate community got behind STEM learning. (science, technology, engineering and math). This even though SEL is a more important current and long-term need given the youth’s mental health and learning crisis declared by the US Surgeon General affecting millions of kids whose lives and sense of well-being were disrupted by Covid restrictions – many of whom without SEL will never take on a STEM career.
We just launched a campaign to engage student involvement in advocating for SEL in their schools and among friends (see https://equipourkids.org/
For this and other speaking engagements, we created a Speakers Bureau viewable at https://equipourkids.org/
You can help advance any of these campaigns by sending a note to [email protected]. Watch some videos on our website to see what a difference-maker SEL is.
We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up?Summer camp. Had most freedom to be me away from home.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://equipourkids.org
- Facebook: https://www.linkedin.com/in/levinjay/
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