Evidence-Based Programming

Our program has been studied twice by University of Southern California professor Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang. The first study was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2017. The second study in 2019, was funded by the Templeton Foundation. 

These evaluations provided an evidence-based framework for our model with the number one outcome being “a greater sense of purpose” for our student participants.

Benefits

Quantitative findings from two USC studies showed:​​​ ​

These articles discuss how Sages & Seekers cultivates a sense of purpose for the teen participants.

How Friendships with Elders Help Teens Find Purpose

New Research Shows that Transcendent Thinking can Increase Teens’ Sense of Purpose

Results of our one-year study funded by the National Endowment for the Arts showed that Sages & Seekers intergenerational storytelling intervention increased adolescents’ reported sense of social connectedness, psychological wellbeing, and purpose-in- life, and especially so for participants with the lowest initial levels. Moreover, adolescents’ changing abilities to conceptualize their future goals in terms of ethical and relational values, instead of hedonistic or pragmatic motives, mediated the increases in reported purpose-in-life. Older adult participants showed increased generativity and working memory performance.

For the Templeton Foundation study, the overarching empirical aims of this project were to investigate the developmental trajectories of youths’ meaning-making across the intervention, and to probe the effects of meaning-making on changes in virtues, purpose, spirituality, civic participation and stress regulation. Participants reported self-transcendent purpose scores, wisdom scores, hope and gratitude scores increased from pre- to post- intervention.