Project: GIVE is a program designed to inform middle school-aged kids about the needs and concerns in the world around them. Like its parent organization, The Singer Foundation, Project: GIVE is dedicated to making a difference in the world by bringing people together to effect change.

As a part of Project-GIVE, middle schools are provided with up to $5,000 grants to fund mini-foundations created by the students. Under the guidance of adult facilitators, the students conduct careful research regarding the areas of need within their own community and, working together as a team, allot their funding to the charities that address the issues with which they are most concerned.
Project: GIVE empowers young people to become knowledgeable, caring and active members of their community:

• Students gain an awareness and understanding of the real needs within their own community.
• Students who are involved in their community have a greater capacity for compassion, tolerance and charity.
• Students are exposed to positive role models – those people who are already striving to make the world a better place.
• Students have the opportunity to encounter and experience new career fields.
• Students are able to engage their imaginations and develop new leadership skills.

This program provides multiple benefits for a vulnerable population group that often is “ignored” by researchers, clinicians and community activists. Please feel free to read the attached article on how specifically ProjectGive can assist with the development of this unique developmental stage. Here are some of the few highlights of why this program works, and why you should choose to get involved:

ProjectGive will assist with helping middle school children to become more empathic people (Sargeant & Woodlife, 2007).

Research has shown that this age group starts to develop emerging skills of planning, creativity and logic development. ProjectGive’s specific activities assist with the growth of these developmental skills and attributes.

Involvement with ProjectGive will assist with decreasing destructive behavioral patterns. The positive patterns that replace such will carry over into young adulthood.
Charitable behaviors lead to a more well-rounded life in terms of politics, social movements, and religious, artistic communities (Lohmann, 1992).

The activities that ProjectGive promotes will assist middle school children with their abilities to strategize and think in multidimensional ways (Blakemore & Choudhurry, 2006).

ProjectGive’s’ activities will assist with developing children’s “executive functioning” skills, which include: decision making, selective attention, working memory, and voluntary response inhibition (Luna, Garver, Urban, Lazar & Sweeney, 2004)

Gary T. Thompson, Psy.D.