A panel on supporting youth mental health
Hundreds of friends, colleagues, and supporters joined us in New York City in September, 2023 for a Making Caring Common 10th anniversary panel on supporting youth mental health.
Moderator & speakers
Rehema Ellis
Rehema Ellis joined NBC NEWS in 1994 as a general assignment correspondent. In 2010 she was named Education Correspondent and was an integral part of NBC’s first annual Education Nation summit that focused on the strengths and weaknesses of America’s education system.
Her reports appear on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, Today, and MSNBC. She is also a digital journalist. Ellis shoots, blogs, writes for NBC on-line, and she tweets.
Ellis was part of the NBC Emmy award-winning coverage of the plane crash in the Hudson River called, Miracle on the Hudson. She also won an Emmy for her reporting on the 2008 Presidential Election of Barack Obama and his historic inauguration.
Ellis has been part of other headliner stories including the attacks on the World Trade Center. She was the first person to identify the attack on the air as “Nine-Eleven.” She’s reported on Hurricane Katrina, the death of Michael of Jackson, and the Haiti earthquake.
As a correspondent for NBC, Ellis traveled to Zaire to report on the mass killings that left an estimated one million people dead in Rwanda. A few years later she spent a month in Greece covering the summer Olympics.
Kiran Bhai
Kiran is Program Director, Schools & Parenting, for Making Caring Common. In this role, Kiran oversees Making Caring Common’s K-12 and parenting programs, focusing on expanding empathy, justice, and care across differences.
Kiran is passionate about education, mental health, and the holistic wellbeing of children and youth. Prior to her time at MCC, Kiran was a school counselor in Massachusetts and New Mexico and worked at several global health nonprofits across the country focusing on mental health.
Kiran received her Master’s in Education and Counseling from Harvard Graduate School of Education and her Bachelor of Arts in Global Health from Duke University.
Dr. Lisa Damour
Dr. Lisa Damour is the author of three New York Times best sellers: “Untangled,” “Under Pressure,” and “The Emotional Lives of Teenagers.” She co-hosts the Ask Lisa podcast, works in collaboration with UNICEF, and is recognized as a thought leader by the American Psychological Association. Dr. Damour is also a regular contributor to The New York Times and CBS News.
Dr. Damour serves as a senior advisor to the Schubert Center for Child Studies at Case Western Reserve University and has written numerous academic papers, chapters, and books related to education and child development. She maintains a clinical practice and also speaks to schools, professional organizations, and corporate groups around the world on the topics of child and adolescent development, family mental health, and adult well-being.
Dr. Tara Christie Kinsey
In July 2015, Dr. Tara Christie Kinsey was appointed the eighth head of school at The Hewitt School. Dr. Kinsey is committed to granting girls and young women access to the kind of education and leadership development that expands their confidence, capacities, and sense of purpose in forging a better world.
A lifelong learner, educator, feminist, coach, and leader, she received her A.B. in English from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in English from Emory University. She began her teaching career at Peddie School and has taught at Emory University, Oxford University, Georgetown University, and Princeton University. Prior to her appointment at Hewitt, she served as associate dean in the Office of the Dean of the College and the Office of the Vice President for Campus Life at Princeton University. Dr. Kinsey and her family live in New York City, where she enjoys going to restaurants, theaters, concerts, and exhibits, cooking, meditating, and watching her children play sports.
Jennifer Wallace
Jennifer Wallace is an award-winning journalist and author of the instant New York Times best seller, “Never Enough: When Achievement Pressure Becomes Toxic – and What We Can Do About It.” She is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post and appears on national television to discuss her articles and relevant topics in the news.
After graduating from Harvard College, Wallace began her journalism career at CBS “60 Minutes,” where she was part of a team that won a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. She is a journalism fellow at the Center for Parent and Teen Communication at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and serves on the board of the Coalition for the Homeless in New York City.
Wallace lives in New York City with her husband and their three children.
Richard Weissbourd
Richard Weissbourd is a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Kennedy School of Government. His work focuses on moral development, the nature of hope, vulnerability and resilience in childhood, parenting, and effective schools and services for children. He directs the Making Caring Common Project, a national effort to make moral and social development priorities in child-raising and to provide strategies to schools and parents for promoting in children caring, a commitment to justice, and other key moral and social capacities. He leads an initiative to reform college admissions, Turning the Tide, which has engaged over 300 college admissions offices. This initiative seeks to elevate ethical character, reduce excessive achievement pressure and increase equity and access in the college admissions process. He is also conducting research on how older adults can better mentor young adults and teenagers in developing caring, ethical, mature romantic relationships.
He is a founder of several interventions for children facing risks, including ReadBoston and WriteBoston, city-wide literacy initiatives led by Mayor Menino. He is also a founder of a pilot school in Boston, the Lee Academy, that begins with children at three years old. He has advised on the city, state, and federal levels on family policy, parenting, and school reform and has written for numerous scholarly and popular publications and blogs, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today and NPR. He is the author of “The Vulnerable Child: What Really Hurts America’s Children and What We Can Do About It” (Addison-Wesley, 1996), named by the American School Board Journal as one of the top 10 education books of all time. His most recent book, “The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development” (Houghton Mifflin 2009), was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 24 books of 2009.
Posted by Alison Cashin, Director of Communications
