"There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly."

We are seeking diverse young people who are passionate about evolving a better future and ready to launch real-world projects. Our vision is a perennial youth movement, providing lifelong mentorship and peer support toward personal and cultural flourishing.  ​

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Who:

• Volunteer Co-Design Fellows, ages 18-25. 

• Volunteer adult mentors.  

• A network of peers, researchers, and professional educators.

 

What:

• Co-Design Fellows prepare ProSocial Youth for launch and eventual transfer to peer to peer youth leadership.

• Youth teams participate in a global online training network with four components (see below).​

• Volunteer mentors help local teams with component #3, applying/doing Prosocial. 

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Prosocial Youth - four components:​

1. Learning/understanding Prosocial (and adjacent concepts and theories). 

2. Learning community science methodologies / design based research.

3. Applying/doing Prosocial toward personal, school and/or community improvement.

4. Evolving/governing ProSocial Youth. 

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Co-Design Fellows:

To support a perennial peer to peer youth led movement, we invite young adults ages 18-25 to oversee the integration of all four components, their evolution and gradual transfer to youth leadership. Time commitment: Three hours per week. Co-Design Fellowships may vary in length from 3 weeks - 15 weeks. Fellows may participate in multiple generations. Fellows receive complimentary entry into a ProSocial World Learning Journey (tuition waived) and opportunities for career/college networking with peers, researchers and professional educators. 

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Applying/doing Prosocial
The science of Prosocial is complex. By using a tool that embodies the science of Prosocial while advancing issues that youth care deeply about, we are able to create project tracks that foster collective learning and action, which may lead to effective learning communities or guilds. 

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Tools that support project tracks or guilds (from most to least complex):

• DEAL City Portrait Tool (for your community)

• Adapting the DEAL City Portrait Tool for School Improvement

• ProSocial Schools - Field Guide for School Improvement

• Youth Mayors Field Guide

• Engaging Youth for Positive Change

• ProSocial Schools - Field Guide for School Gardens

• Community surveys related to social conditions, well-being etc. per context

• Choose your own team tool or track

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Getting started

• Co-Design Fellows  

• At this time, all participants should have the ability to attend training in English and online.

 

What is important about cultural evolution? Here's a perspective from Joseph Henrich, professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University: "You can't separate "culture" from "psychology" or "psychology" from "biology" because culture physically rewires our brains and thereby shapes how we think". This leads to behaviors which give shape to our world in ways that are more or less workable for ourselves and others. Want to co-evolve a world that works for all?

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What is ProSocial World? ProSocial World is a U.S. 501(c)3 non-profit that hosts a global networked improvement community to predict and influence positive cultural evolution. Aligned with modern evolutionary science, this entails an account of variation, selection and retention of cultural traits. Cultural traits include our social norms, practices and agreements, our theories of improvement, our learning methods, institutions and more. We seek to evolve these cultural traits to support safe, rapid and equitable improvement in our lives and communities. 

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Going deeper, at the heart of what we do is foster understanding and improvement between three cultural traits, each an account or perspective, that relate to what is or is not working in our lives and society. They are: 1) an account of variation in group performance at multiple levels and in diverse contexts; 2) an account of variation in human behavior; and 3) an account of selection-and-retention for the conditions that support personal and cultural flourishing in (1) and (2).

 

If we succeed in co-evolving all three traits (with your help), ProSocial has the promise to be:

• A human right to education.

• A Rosetta Stone for modern science and public policy. 

• A scientifically adequate and adaptive strategy to realize community-selected aims.

• A tool to predict and influence positive cultural evolution at multiple levels. 

• A balance between personal, group and societal needs, up to a planetary scale.