Feasibility of a Social-emotional Learning Curriculum in an After-school Program for Youth

The EMPOWER project is a community-academic partnership between 2 after school programs (beyond 3:30 and Visions of Science) and a mental health teaching hospital (Centre for Addiction and Mental Health). The main objective of this project is to bolster youth mental well-being by developing a novel social-emotional learning curriculum that after school programs can embed into their existing activities. The curriculum is designed to improve youth's social emotional learning skills through the integration of short social-emotional learning lessons that are embedded into existing programming within an after school program. The curriculum is based on the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning's five core SEL competencies that include self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and decision-making. The investigators have designed a pilot study to test the feasibility and efficacy of the EMPOWER social-emotional learning curriculum. Beyond 3:30 has 20 sites that are housed in schools across socially and economically vulnerable locations. We will randomize (based on class size and sites who participated in a previous trial of a part of the curriculum) 10 sites to be in the intervention and 10 sites to be in the usual programming control. The intervention arm will implement the 16-week EMPOWER social-emotional learning curriculum, while the usual programming control arm will implement regular beyond 3:30 programming.