The Happiness Project

Helping children & young people learn about happiness and spread it to others in their community.

The Happiness Project (THP) is a social and emotional learning programme designed to help children (aged 6-14) understand their emotions and develop strong social connections with others. The programme is made up of five different activities built around The Happiness Project’s key ingredients to happiness; connections, kindness, gratitude, creativity & movement.

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Overview

Information on this page is provided by the innovator and has not been evaluated by HundrED.

Web presence

2022

Established

250K

Children

7

Countries

Target group

Students lower

Updated

May 2024

We want to see SEL on every school curriculum around the world, so that children can grow up to be emotionally literate, happy in themselves and able to talk about their feelings. We also want to see happy teachers, empowered to create happy and safe learning spaces in which they can cultivate strong relationships with their students, instilling a sense of belonging in the classroom.

About the innovation

Why did you create this innovation?

THP tackles the challenges faced by children & young people globally around the rise in loneliness and youth mental health challenges, in line with SDG3: Good Health & Wellbeing. With 50% of mental health problems established before age 14, it's crucial for children to develop positive habits and have an understanding of their own emotional well-being.

What does your innovation look like in practice?

THP is a joint partnership between Project Everyone & Wall’s Ice Cream. THP is delivered through NGO partners that translate & adapt the materials for the local context, and train teachers who implement the project in their classroom within existing lesson time or in after-school clubs. Teachers are provided with a facilitator guide, presentation slides & student workbooks. All resources are free to access and in low resource classrooms, teachers are given a stipend to pay for resource printing. The learning is delivered over the course of 4-6 months.

Evidence from our pilots in Pakistan, Germany & Sweden show that THP has a positive impact on students’ emotional literacy & relationships with their peers, with parents noticing a shift in their children’s academic outcomes, and teachers reporting higher levels of motivation to learn.

How has it been spreading?

Since its launch on International Day of Happiness in 2022, The Happiness Project has reached +250,000 children in six countries.

Our approach is to identify delivery partners and work with them on a smaller scale pilot in Year 1. We then scale the project in Years 2 & 3. An example of this is our work in Pakistan with the CARE Foundation. In the pilot year we reached 5k children and have scaled to 50k children in Year 2. This was based on findings from the impact report leading to a shift from a grade-specific intervention, to a whole-school approach.

Our goals for 2024-25 are to build the capacity of our current delivery partners to scale further and launch pilots in Mexico and Ecuador.

From 2025, we want to explore how THP can be delivered as a digital intervention for parents.

If I want to try it, what should I do?

Get in touch with the team at thehappinessproject@project-everyone.org, or explore and download the resources from our website and adapt them directly for your school / classroom. All resources are free to download and available as editable files, and we are more than happy to support you during your adaptation and implementation.

Implementation steps

Step 1: Explore our Free Resources

Download the resources and familiarise yourself with the facilitator guide, presentation slides and student workbook. THP was designed to be modular in nature with activities ranging from 15 min daily challenges to 8-hours design thinking sessions. We wanted to create a toolkit that educators could easily use and adapt to their classroom or implementation method.

Step 2: Discover what Happiness Means to You with Inside Happiness

We highly recommend starting with Activity 1: Inside Happiness. Inside Happiness helps students set the foundations of what happiness means to them. Through a self-reflection exercise, students will complete their ‘happiness ice-cream’ in which they consider the most important factors that allow them to build their own happiness. This is the starting point in helping students develop emotional awareness and literacy.

Step 3: Complete the 25-Day Challenge!

The second learning activity is called the “Let’s make it happier” challenge, consisting of 25 daily activities that students can complete within 15 mins. Each activity is linked to an ingredient to happiness, and the purpose is to help children develop daily habits to practice gratitude, move their bodies, get creative and build connections with self, others and nature through acts of kindness.

Step 4: Create a Happiness Project with Design Thinking

If you are unfamiliar with Design Thinking, take some time to read-through the guides. The third learning activity “Designing a Happiness Project” is slightly more complex, as students will apply the design thinking steps to identify a barrier to happiness in their community, and unleash their creativity to develop a solution to overcome it.

Step 5: Become Happiness Heroes

In this peer-to-peer activity, invite older students to share their happiness tips and tricks to younger students. Together, they will build a class charter and work on further developing their emotional literacy skill by creating a feelings tree.

Step 6: Celebrate all your Learning with the Happier Together Festival.

For this activity, students and teachers come together to organise a happiness festival (for the class, the year or the whole school) to showcase all their learning and outcomes from THP. This is the best way to wrap-up THP!