Big Thought

At Big Thought, we believe that all youth have innate greatness. Our North Star: All youth are equipped to imagine and create their best lives and world. Driven by our mission to make imagination a part of everyday learning, Big Thought is a social impact enterprise that focuses on youth development by preparing young creators with the skills and resources they need for the 21st century workplace. We exist to empower and equip youth to Create Great we're creating creators. At Big Thought, we provide the space and agency to support young creators through our programs and partnerships, which are powered by our dedicated research and development team that enables us to design high quality evidence-based programs, measure our impact, and expand our reach. Throughout our 30+ year history of innovation, Big Thought has become an award-winning national model in arts education, out of school time systems, summer learning and juvenile justice intervention. Now, we're one of six community partnerships in the U.S. helping scale national best practices in social and emotional learning.At our core, we empower youth to:1. build their creative muscle,2. develop social and emotional skills and wellbeing and,3. create their authentic voice.Big Thought implements three approaches to deliver this work:1. Direct to youth programs. We develop and deliver high quality curriculum and programs to serve communities with the greatest need. Big Thought programs reach on average over 6,700 students for more than 219,000 learning hours annually.2. Learning Systems. We do this by strategically connecting partners and resources across the city to create learning systems that address these themes. Big Thought Learning Systems reach on average over 120,000 students for more than 2.1 million learning hours annually.3. Powered by Big Thought, Big Thought Institute (BTI) is an innovative partner that enables organizations to expand their capacity to build creativity, develop 21st Century skills, and deliver unique learning experiences. BTI provides professional learning, consulting, design and research-based services to empower our clients to effectively teach, develop and create. We leverage evidence-based best practices in creativity and learning systems that have been established over 30 years. BTI serves over 20 clients annually and delivers training to over 1,900 individuals annually.