EMPOWER Pediatric Curriculum Fund

EMPOWER Youth is a digital, stepped-care intervention that equips frontline providers with practical tools to support adolescents experiencing emotional and behavioral challenges.

Over the past year, the Mental Health For All Lab advanced EMPOWER Youth from formative research and early pilot testing toward implementation in real-world community settings. With support from the EMPOWER Pediatric Curriculum Fund, the team initiated an implementation study at YWCA San Antonio, continued testing the intervention in schools in Tokyo, and strengthened the training, supervision, implementation, and data-collection resources needed for future expansion.

New publications describe the adolescent mental health care gap and the research process underlying the design of EMPOWER Youth. Together, these efforts position EMPOWER Youth as a flexible intervention that can be adapted for delivery in schools, community programs, faith settings, and other trusted environments. 

EMPOWER Youth

2025-2026 Overview

Moving EMPOWER Youth into Community Implementation

With support from the EMPOWER Pediatric Curriculum Fund, the Mental Health For All Lab initiated an implementation study at a Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in San Antonio, Texas.

Four trained YWCA staff members are delivering EMPOWER Youth to approximately 20 adolescents in a lower-income community through routine after-school programming. The study is examining the intervention’s early effectiveness, acceptability, and feasibility, as well as the supervision, data-collection, and implementation supports needed for community delivery.

This work builds on formative research and early pilot testing supported by the Manton Foundation. It is helping the team understand how trained providers outside traditional clinical settings can deliver EMPOWER Youth.

EMPOWER Youth is designed for use in the settings where adolescents already live, learn, and connect, including schools, after-school programs, faith communities, and other youth-serving organizations. The intervention complements specialist care by providing brief, structured support and helping providers identify when referral to more intensive services may be appropriate.

 The San Antonio implementation study complements ongoing testing of EMPOWER Youth in schools in Tokyo, Japan.

Testing the intervention in both community and school settings is helping the team determine which components should remain consistent and which can be adapted to local language, culture, educational systems, provider roles, and referral pathways.

Together, the San Antonio and Tokyo activities are helping assess EMPOWER Youth’s potential for use across diverse school and community settings. 

Continuing International Adaptation in Tokyo

The Mental Health For All Lab developed EMPOWER Youth to close the gap between adolescents’ need for mental health support and the limited availability of accessible, acceptable, and age-appropriate services.

Two recent publications describe the rationale and design of the intervention. The first examines barriers to adolescent mental health care, including provider shortages, long wait times, stigma, and the burden of lengthy treatments. The second describes how research evidence, expert consultation, and provider feedback informed EMPOWER Youth’s stepped-care model and digital training program.

The team also submitted a manuscript reporting findings from its EMPOWER Youth pilot study; it is now under review. 

Research Underpinning EMPOWER Youth

To support expansion, the team created an implementation guide that covers training, case-based learning, supervision, delivery logistics, quality assurance, data collection, and adaptation to new settings.

Additional materials include:

Building the Infrastructure for Implementation

The team also refined a data-collection protocol with recommended measures and procedures for maintaining consistency across current and future implementation sites.

Together, these resources provide partners with the tools needed to train providers, monitor delivery, evaluate outcomes, and adapt EMPOWER Youth responsibly.

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The Mental Health For All Lab conducted site visits and met with potential partners in McAllen, Texas, San Antonio, and San Diego. These conversations helped the team identify potential delivery models and institutional champions, including Wellness Together, which leads mental health training and implementation in California schools.

In San Antonio, 26 congregation members completed EMPOWER Youth training and expressed interest in using the techniques in their churches and families. The team also held exploratory conversations with Partners In Health Haiti about adapting the intervention for Haitian youth.

The team presented EMPOWER Youth in May at the Bold Ideas for Brighter Futures conference on child and adolescent mental health in Cape Town, South Africa, and in June at the World Confederation of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies Congress in San Francisco. These presentations provided opportunities to share the program’s development, research foundation, and implementation potential with researchers, clinicians, educators, and other professionals working to improve adolescent mental health.

Building Partnerships and Sharing the Model

Presenting at the Bold Ideas for Brighter Futures conference

The team at the World Confederation of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies Congress