Driving healthy mental health habits across our youth through healthy relationships with people and nature.
In one week in August, an 18-year-old loses every relationship they have.
It is the most predictable rupture in a young life, and no institution prepares anyone for it.
The Healthy Minds Study surveys more than 84,000 students a year, and the clinical picture is getting better: severe depression fell from 23% to 18%, and suicidal thoughts from 15% to 11%. Connection didn't move. More than half of students still report high loneliness, and flourishing (purpose, optimism, self-esteem) actually dropped to 36%.
The study's own conclusion is the reason we exist. Treating mental illness and building mental wellness are related, but they are not the same job.
Counseling centers are winning at the acute end. Nobody is teaching connection, because it isn't billable, it isn't clinical, and it doesn't fit inside a fifty-minute appointment. We don't compete with the counseling center. We're what they refer people to when nothing is wrong enough to treat.
of college students report high loneliness. The number didn't budge, even as clinical treatment improved.
of lifetime mental illness begins by age 24. That's why the first year away from home matters most.
Channel Dynamics spends its days mapping supply chains: reading the signals inside an industry and working out what they say about what happens next. That turns out to be a portable skill. Human behavior has patterns too. They repeat, they show up hardest under pressure, and they are no less legible than a market cycle. They are just far less taught.
The Foundation is what happened when we pointed the same research discipline at relationships, and at what the science already tells us about the developing brain. A supply chain and a nineteen-year-old are not the same problem, and we're not pretending otherwise. But the habit transfers: look for the signal, name the pattern, act earlier. That habit is what we want to hand to students.
The Foundation is funded by twenty percent of the annual profit of Channel Dynamics.
Arm one · Charitable giving
Multi-year support for organizations putting consistent adults in front of young people: suicide prevention in Routt and Moffat counties, school-based mental health, mentoring, rural clinician supply, and outdoor access for kids who couldn't otherwise afford it.
Funding priorities and the first grant cycle will be published here once they're settled.
Arm two · Hawthorne Labs
Our own program, and the only place we use AI. It's optional, free, and open to college students: chapters learning to read their own patterns and other people's, using AI and a personal context file. Trained facilitators lead them, and a licensed clinician oversees the network.
Free, optional, and open to any college student who wants in. Students learn to use AI seriously, with a behavioral context file that carries what they've worked out about how they relate, and then to turn that into better conversations with the people actually in their lives. Eight weeks starting in orientation, then a lighter rhythm through spring.
Every week
Ninety minutes, in person, in a small group, with a trained facilitator and two paid student leads.
Every week
Guided sessions against your own context file. The AI knows how you tend to relate, so the help is actually about you.
Every week
One session in the open air, together, without phones. Whatever the weather.
Every week
A real conversation with a real human being. Everything else exists to make this one easier to start.
An analyst reads an industry cycle. A manager reads a team. The skill is the same: patterns repeat, and once you see them coming you make better decisions. People work this way too, and almost nobody is taught it.
Nobody lives in one state. A pattern looks different at its best, at rest, and under pressure. Learning to read your own signs, and other people's, is the point.
Nine patterns, and the lines between them.
Tap any number for a short description, and how that pattern tends to show up at its best, at rest, and under pressure.
You learn your own pattern first: what you reach for under pressure, and what you need when things get hard. It isn't a label, it's a starting point.
Once you can name it in yourself, you start noticing it in the people around you. Your roommate isn't difficult. They need something different from what you need, and conflict starts to look like mismatch rather than character.
Our AI tools carry what you've learned about how you relate, so the help you get is actually about you. That context stays yours. You own it, you can read it, and you can delete it.
One rule holds the whole thing together: you learn to notice, not to label. Nobody is scored, and nobody gets typed by someone else. Reading a pattern is about asking a better question, never about deciding who someone is.
More to come
We're designing summer programming in the mountains around Steamboat Springs. It's the outdoor half of the mission, at a scale a semester can't reach. Details, dates, and eligibility will be published here once they're settled.
Through campus programs and summer camps, we provide the AI infrastructure, enneagram training, and AI coaching to help young adults build a life coach in their pocket.
Hawthorne Labs is optional, free, and open to college students. Members are verified 18 or older. A licensed clinician oversees the program and wrote our crisis protocol.
What you write stays yours. We never use it to train a model, never share it with your school, and delete it whenever you ask. The AI tells you it's an AI, sessions are capped by design, and nothing about you is scored, typed, or put on a record.
This is not therapy, counseling, or a crisis service. We refer to your counseling center, and we hope they refer to us. If you're in crisis, call or text 988.
To shape the curriculum and hold the safety line.
clinical@hawthornefoundation.orgTo host a founding chapter and tell us what's wrong with it.
campus@hawthornefoundation.orgIf you already do this work with young people.
grants@hawthornefoundation.orgIncluding anyone willing to publish a null result.
research@hawthornefoundation.org