Building a Strong Identity and Coping Skills (BaSICS)
What is the Building a Strong Identity and Coping Skills (BaSICS) Program?
Building a Strong Identity and Coping Skills (BaSICS) is a new intervention developed by the CaRES Lab for children and adolescents facing chronic stress. Stress is associated with numerous physical and mental health problems. For children and adolescents, certain types of stress – such as stress due to discrimination or family money problems – are especially harmful because children have little control over these problems. Fortunately, children can learn tools to help them manage stress. The BaSICS Program seeks to help children develop positive personal and cultural identities and to learn healthy ways of dealing with the stress in their lives.
The BaSICS Program is designed to
- Foster positive youth development
- Prevent depression, delinquency, substance use, school disengagement
- Alleviate negative effects of poverty and discrimination stress via the development of:
- Practical education about stress and how it relates to inequalities
- Healthy coping skills
- Positive personal and collective identity
- Collective power and social action
- Empowers youths to work toward systematic change
The goal of the BaSICS project is to provide a trauma-sensitive curriculum that can serve as an important classroom-level intervention by providing educators with the necessary knowledge and skills to address the learning needs of young children in chronically stressed environments.
Studies Involving the BaSICS Intervention Program
BaSICS Random Controlled Trial
BaSICS was an 8-week long community-based program designed for pre-adolescents between the ages of 11 and 12. This was the first intervention program to integrate coping skills training and positive identity development for youth. This study is complete. Preliminary analysis of results from the BaSICS Randomized Control Trial are published.
Rise Uptown
The Rise Uptown project is partnered with Harrisburg school district & Tri-County Community Action to deliver a school-based and community-driven intervention designed to both eliminate drivers of crime and give youth (and parents) active ways to combat and prevent stress and trauma in their community. Training and consultation was provided to teachers & the BaSICS (Building a Strong Identity and Coping Skills) program was delivered to 5th and 6th graders at Camp Curtin. This highly innovative program had a high and sustained positive impact in this community and could serve as a model for many other communities within and beyond Pennsylvania. This study is complete.
vBaSICS
The vBaSICS program partnered with the Harrisburg School District to deliver the virtual BaSICS (Building a Strong Identity and Coping Skills) intervention program to 5th and 6th graders at Cougar Academy. Students were able to learn active ways to combat and prevent stress and trauma. Focusing in on the virtual delivery of the intervention program, this new method of delivery serves as a model to address the need for virtual based intervention programs within schools. This project partnered with The Bridge Eco Village to promote sustainability and urban agriculture within the Harrisburg community. This study is complete.