Hausla – wellbeing skills for teachers

What is the community’s story?

With the rise of mental health challenges among young people across the world, many organizations are designing models to help children build social and emotional skills in school.

However, teachers have largely been left behind in these initiatives. Too many have overlooked a teacher’s significant role as a trusted adult in the lives of children whose communities are systemically marginalized. Particularly in India, where more than 100,000 government schools have only one teacher on staff (and many more with only a few), a single teacher’s capacity to show up and create compassionate and meaningful learning experiences has the potential to change hundreds of lives over the years.

What is our partnership about?

In 2020, we launched a partnership with Kshamtalaya Foundation to design a contextualized wellbeing skills program for teachers that could be delivered through radio and audio. These brief sessions included lessons, stories, practices, and reflections that anyone, even with low tech access, could participate.

Since 2020, thousands of teachers have participated in Hausla, sharing the audios with their family and friends during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic. In early evaluations, participants experienced reduced stress, more emotion awareness and regulation, and a sense of social connectedness in an era of isolation.

In 2022, Pinterest selected Brio as a Purpose Partner, and was a pioneering supporter in scaling up Hausla systematically through government partnership. In September 2022, an MOU was signed with the government of Sirohi in Rajasthan to run the program with 2,000 educators in the district.

To meaningfully reach and support each educator, Kshamtalaya and Brio designed a fellowship program for emerging social sector professionals interested in integrating wellbeing into their respective fields. In October 2022, the inaugural cohort of fellows, or “Wellbeing-preneurs,” gathered to kick off the program and receive training on facilitating the Hausla program.

Starting in November, the Wellbeing-preneurs began facilitating the program in cohorts: launching vision-casting sessions with lead teachers, inviting teachers to join the program, and holding spaces for conversation and reflection together.

What is the impact so far?

Countless teachers shared their feedback and gratitude that the program provided them a way to learn meaningful supportive skills to navigate their inner experiences— particularly the difficult thoughts and emotions that arise in a challenging and frequently isolating job.

We are truly excited to see the data that has emerged from the cohorts we have run with Hausla. In a pre/post evaluation, we found statistically significant improvements of medium effect size as defined by the following validated scales:

• 69% improved in wellbeing on the WHO-5 Wellbeing Index
• 59% improved in mindfulness on the Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills
• 38% improved in resilience on the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale

This is really important: in communities that have few options for clinical mental health support, it is critical to address mental health at the community and population levels— at scale. What we learned from implementing Hausla through government partnership and training wellbeing facilitators is that it is possible to provide a broad group of participants the opportunity to build measurable mental wellbeing skills, and see statistically significant results for a large proportion of the participants.

These skills serve to support those who may be experiencing mental health challenges, while also reducing the risk of developing more critical conditions. The effectiveness of thoughtfully trained non-expert facilitators further underscores the possibility of using well-designed mental health promotion methods to reach much broader groups than a clinical-only treatment model.

What have we learned?

Human connection matters: While we have refined the pre-recorded audio component of Hausla through rounds of participant feedback, one of the powerful aspects of the program is teachers’ experience of a cohort and a facilitator who reaches out and checks in with them. With the prevalence of apps and chatbots, wellbeing programs are at the fingertips of many. However, the social connection component appears to contribute to the positive outcomes we are seeing with teachers who go through this facilitated process. In many of the live debriefs, educators share that they wish more of these spaces were available to them in an ongoing manner.

We must experience wellbeing to teach it: As more education systems integrate mental health and wellbeing initiatives for students, it is critical for teachers not only to understand the concepts of wellbeing but ideally also to practice it themselves. Many participants shared that they had led social-emotional curricula assigned to them in the past with their classrooms, but did not understand why they were doing those activities until completing Hausla for themselves. Just as we would not ask someone without mastery of basic math to teach math, it’s critical to ensure educators have experiential knowledge of the wellbeing content they are asked to facilitate.

Wellbeing connects to vitality at work: Teachers the world over have a demanding and important job. Their sense of engagement and commitment at work directly affects the children in their classrooms. Many Hausla participants shared how the program restored their sense of resilience and inspiration, improving the way they respond to students. By learning how to navigate their own inner experiences, connect to a sense of purpose, and strengthen their relationships, teachers experienced more vitality and stability.

What’s next?

There’s a growing interest in wellbeing in India, particularly in education and social sectors, as a critical component of meaningful work and lasting impact. Since the program’s success in Sirohi, the program is now running with 2,000 additional teachers in Bihar, as well as scaled up in new teacher training with the government. As a result, the program has reached 120,000 teachers through this government partnership at the end of 2023.

We truly believe that wellbeing skills can be transformative for individuals and communities facing adversity— and that mental health at the population level can cultivate more compassion and agency even in extraordinarily tough circumstances.

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