What’s Inside Each Smart Guide
GET SET — A Smart Guide to Life Skills and Adulting
Is a youth in your care chomping at the bit to become an adult, with possibly only a vague idea of what that means?
The GET SET Guide may be a good place to start. It is a great compilation of useful things to know about preparation, education, and planning on the path to adult independence.
It’s based on over 40 years of experience working with young adults and draws on both evidence-based research and work with focus groups made up of both youth and adults who serve them.
It is organized around a series of questions that are or should be on the mind of every young person on the threshold of adult life. It begins with the question “When will I be an Adult?” It explores the legal, biological, social, developmental, financial, and behavioral definitions for adulthood in our culture, giving youth a sense of not only where they may currently be on that journey but also on which things are actually in their control and which are not.
The GET SET guide is one of our most popular life skills guides for independent living programs for teens looking to prepare youth for successful adulthood.
GET WORK — A Smart Guide to Workforce Readiness
GET WORK is an exploration of useful things to know about finding and keeping a job and building a career. It’s based on workforce development research, conversations with employers, and over 40 years of experience helping young adults figure out how work works and how to prepare for and enter the adult world of work.
Part 1 focuses on finding a job that takes youth beyond the basics of filling out job applications. It offers the kind of success skills and secrets that make people excel at interviewing for jobs and getting hired—chiefly the art of personal branding and how you present yourself to others.
Part 2 helps youth understand why people get retained and promoted at work and how to continue to present themselves in the best possible light.
Part 3 explores the relationship between planning, personality, and what makes you happy in building a career.
The GET WORK guide supports job readiness training for youth and equips them with practical job readiness skills for youth to succeed in any work environment.”
GET MONEY — A Smart Guide to Money Management
As adults, next to relationships, the thing we probably worry about most is money—earning it, spending it, managing it, saving it, investing it, and protecting it.
Just like relationships, it’s a topic we seldom learn about consistently in school. GET MONEY is a collection of important tips for managing your money for financial independence.
Sections 1 and 2 address some of the basics of budgeting, tracking, and managing money and move into setting and managing smart financial goals. It covers practical tasks like creating a basic budget for yourself, understanding the four types of expenses you will encounter. And learning how to create “S.M.A.R.T.” financial goals.
Section 3 covers money for independence and expands on those basic skills for the goal of living on your own. Section 4 looks at the importance of banks and banking and what banks can do for you. Section 5 is about a financial strategy for emergencies and covers savings accounts, credit cards, insurance plans, and loans. Section 6 addresses money for your future and ways to protect your money from fraud and scams.
Produced with a grant from Towne Bank, this guide takes you beyond making money (covered in GET WORK) and into the skills you need to effectively manage your money.
It breaks complex financial topics into easy-to-digest sections with practical, action-oriented steps.
GET HEALTHY — A Smart Guide to Health and Wellness
GET HEALTHY is a collection of important ideas and practical advice for making the kind of choices that lead to consistently better physical and mental health, as well as overall life happiness and contentment.
Produced in consultation with practicing pediatricians and adolescent psychology therapists, GET HEALTHY offers cutting-edge, research-based guidance for the kinds of behavioral choices that lead to more balanced and healthier bodies, minds, and emotional states.
This is not medical advice, nor is it meant to substitute for medical care or mental health counseling, but recent research suggests that our behavior and the choices we make can have a significant impact on our health and happiness.
This is not medical advice, nor is it meant to substitute for medical care or mental health counseling, but recent research suggests that our behavior and the choices we make can have a significant impact on our health and happiness.
GET HEALTHY is broken down into three sections. Part 1 covers making healthy promoting choices that are within our ability to control, including Diet/Exercise/Sleep, assessing high-risk behaviors and their consequences, and managing injury and illness. Part 2 focuses on managing mental states through mindfulness and understanding the mind/body connection, managing stress, building a flexibility mindset to improve recovery from trauma and life setbacks, and destigmatizing and learning to live with a mental or behavioral health diagnosis such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, isolation, and PTSD.
Part 3 is what we call The Happiness Prescription and includes practical advice for:
Finding a Purpose that inspires your Passion to Pursue it and what that means to overall life contentment and satisfaction;
Activities that activate the happiness hormones in your body;
Increasing your happiness set-point;
Navigating the challenges of personal relationships and the importance of friendships and relationships to overall life expectancy and the quality of life;
Rewriting your story and understanding that a big part of what interferes with our happiness in life is the impact of how we tell the story of who we are and what is happening to us.
Finding a Purpose that inspires your Passion to Pursue it and what that means to overall life contentment and satisfaction;
Activities that activate the happiness hormones in your body;
Increasing your happiness set-point;
Navigating the challenges of personal relationships and the importance of friendships and relationships to overall life expectancy and the quality of life;
Rewriting your story and understanding that a big part of what interferes with our happiness in life is the impact of how we tell the story of who we are and what is happening to us.
Smart Guides — Preparing Youth for Adult Independence and Work
Smart Transitions is a program initiative of the Together We Can Foundation based on brain research, which has revealed just how important the time period of 12 to 24 years of age is for adult brain development and connectivity.
The period in a young person’s life that stretches from puberty through adolescence and into their young adult years is a critical time for the development of an adult-functioning brain. While we may not be able to impact the neurological timetable of brain development, we can do a much better job of promoting socialization and behavioral maturation.
One of the things we have found that truly leads to Smart Transitions are “transition conversations.” That means engaging youth in serious and open-ended conversations about their futures, their dreams, and their plans.
Our life skills guides are designed for independent living programs for teens and youth-serving organizations that want to help students build responsibility, self-confidence, and real-world readiness.
This is the secret behind the success of our small classes targeting at-risk teens. But we also understand that the need is far too great for any one organization to address on its own, so Smart Transitions is also a community and now a national initiative. It involves school systems, human service agencies, and non-profit organizations serving youth.
We’ve taken some of the best information from our youth programs and made it available in print guides to help teachers, parents, mentors, and youth program staff facilitate these transition conversations with the youth in their care. This is our Smart Guide Program.
The guides in this series are between 46 and 54 pages long in full color and profusely illustrated. They are organized into short “chapters” that break down complicated topics into sub-topics that make it easy for youth to read and discuss with parents, teachers, mentors, counselors, case workers, and youth-serving program staff.
These guides are a perfect way to provide structure to a parent/child, teacher/student, or mentor/youth interaction. Some youth will read and digest the material in the guides on their own, asking questions as they arise, but, in our experience, the best-use scenario is when the guides are used as part of an open-ended conversation between a youth or a small group of youth and a caring adult.
All guides come in print form with an accompanying link to both a PDF digital download of the guide and a mentor or parent’s guide to using it to engage creatively with youth.