To enable children to live to their fullest potential – mind, body, spirit.
To close the 11-year gap between onset and treatment of mental illness among children.
Cascades is named after developmental cascades theories that described the emergence of numerous risk patterns that undermined youth development. According to these theories, many children experience challenges adapting to the new social field when they enter school. Underperformance in academic and social domains portend deterioration of child self-perceptions, peer and teacher relations, and academic performance. Repeated failure experiences and negative feedback from social interactions increase youth risk levels for internalizing symptoms, aggressive behavior, maladaptive peer interactions, and school disengagement.
These cascades of failure in academic and/or social fields can escalate with each new developmental transition or challenge. Without intervention, youth experiencing these developmental cascades are at significant risk for school drop-out, deviant peer relations, substance abuse, delinquency, and arrest. Thus, identifying youth experiencing elevated levels of risk on key indicators and providing effective interventions and supports is critical to enabling children and youth to live to their fullest potential. This served as the inspiration for naming our whole child development platform as 'Cascades'
