With Two Big Supporters, a New Research Center Will Help Kids Thrive in a World Filled With Tech

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Whether you are on the subway, at the doctor’s office, or waiting to board a plane, if you look up from your phone long enough to notice, you’ll see that everyone around you is bent over their phone, too. What does it mean that we’ve become a society glued to our devices? And what is the impact on young people who have grown up in this digital world? 

Harvard’s new Center for Digital Thriving will be tackling question like these. The innovation and research center, which opened its doors mid-October, is part of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Its mission: “to create knowledge and research-based resources that help young people — and everyone else — thrive in a tech-filled world.” 

The center was launched with founding grants from the Susan Crown Exchange and Pivotal Ventures. Both organizations are headed by women: Susan Crown is part of the billionaire Crown family, whose fortune was generated by Material Service Corporation, a construction materials distributer; Pivotal Ventures was created by Melinda French Gates. 

Susan Crown headed her family’s foundation, Crown Family Philanthropies, for 24 years, then left to start her own philanthropy, the Susan Crown Exchange (SCE), over a decade ago. The goal of SCE is “preparing youth to thrive in a rapidly changing world,” and funds areas including social and emotional learning, youth sports, and tech and society. Pivotal Ventures, created by Melinda French Gates in 2015, works to advance opportunity and equality. Supporting women and girls — specifically, women and girls of color — has been a primary focus, as IP has reported. Other investment areas include women’s political power, women and technology, and mental health for young people. 

The two join a growing chorus of funders concerned about mental health, especially among young people. A crisis across the U.S. has fueled that concern, and Mindful Philanthropy, which was started by a group of mental health funders, recently issued an urgent call for philanthropy to boost its funding in the area, given the tremendous need. Meanwhile, young people appear to be hit particularly hard, prompting calls to strengthen the pipeline of mental health professionals and boost school-based mental health services. A handful of funders, including the Winston Family Foundation, have zeroed in specifically on the impact of technology on young people, as IP reported last year.

The Susan Crown Exchange and Pivotal Ventures support the Center for Digital Thriving’s approach, which focuses on youth voices and experiences in an effort to understand both the positive and negative impacts of technology. The new center “aims to tell a more complete story of teen life in a hyperconnected world, acknowledging that technology is both helpful and harmful, connecting and dividing,” according to the announcement. Susan Crown Exchange and Pivotal Ventures together provided $5.5 million over four years to create the Center for Digital Thriving; the funds are unrestricted.

Emily Weinstein, a Harvard Graduate School of Education researcher who founded the center with her colleague, Carrie James, said, “Acknowledging the multifaceted nature of tech in the lives of teens must be the starting point if we want to build young people’s agency and actually help them navigate the advantages and drawbacks of living with tech.”

What are adults missing?

Much of the coverage of technology and its impact on young people has focused on the many risks — including promoting negative body image and self-harming behaviors, or exposing young people to cyberbullying, pornography and sexual predators. Carrie James, a sociologist, and Weinstein, an educational psychologist, have a more nuanced perspective because they went right to the source and asked young people themselves. 

For their 2022 book, “Behind Their Screens,” the research team talked to young people across the country about their experiences with technology. “We've been doing research in this space for over a decade,” Weinstein told me. “And again and again throughout the book process, we asked young people, ‘What are adults missing that you most need us to understand?’ This question was just so valuable, it has become a cornerstone of the way we work.”

Understanding young peoples’ experiences helped the researchers identify new paths for intervention; it also clarified why well-intentioned attempts by adults to control young peoples’ tech behavior seldom work. Adult messages and interventions often miss the mark because they tend to overlook or dismiss the positive role tech plays in young peoples’ lives, like helping to strengthen relationships and fostering community, for example.

“We have such an impulse as adults to assume it's all bad and to start conversations with our stress points,” Weinstein said. “But one of the most powerful things we’ve learned in interviewing teens is to ask questions about what's good, for example, ‘What do you love about tech? What are your best tech habits? What are the things that are helping you?’ When we start by asking what's good, we end up not only learning about important positive influences, but then, when we ask teens about what's hard, we've totally changed the tone of the conversation, because teens know that we're taking seriously that the challenges coexist with what is good.”

This was Pivotal Ventures’ first grant in support of Weinstein and James’ work; SCE had supported research for “Behind Their Screens.” The center will conduct research; it is also working with young people, educators, psychologists, clinicians and other experts to develop evidence-based resources, and partnering with Common Sense Education to develop classroom lessons on digital wellbeing. 

“We had this history of partnership and sort of hatched the idea for the center together,” Weinstein said. “We were all thinking about opportunities and pain points in the current research landscape and focused on ways that we could amplify impact. The name — the Center for Digital Thriving — is a bit of a provocation, intentionally so, because we want to help imagine and bring about a world where young people can thrive in a tech-filled era.”

“A tremendous gift”

The Center for Digital Thriving will require additional funding, but Weinstein said the size and unrestricted nature of the founding grants from SCE and Pivotal Ventures have been transformative. 

Funding for academic research is typically restricted to a specific project and can take a year or more to apply for and receive. “In the best case scenario, you start the work 12 to 18 months later,” Weinstein said. “Our founding grants have given us a runway and the ability to be nimble.” 

As an example of the way the center will be able to respond to rapid changes in the tech and policy landscape, Weinstein pointed to upcoming research on new and restrictive social media policies that will roll out in the state of Utah next year.

“It's a major policy change, it’s like a giant natural experiment; we could not design this in a lab,” she said. “I genuinely don't know if it's going to be good or bad. But as soon as we heard about this, we decided, basically overnight, to pivot and collaborate with colleagues in Utah to study the impact of the new policies. We could be nimble and proactive and responsive instead of just constantly reacting with a 12- to 18-month delay. It's such a tremendous gift.”

Technology is here to stay

Susan Crown created the Susan Crown Exchange because, after years at Crown Family Philanthropies, she wanted her giving to be more focused and strategic. “This is my second chapter of foundation life,” she told the New York Times in 2016. “It’s the exact opposite of my first chapter, which was widespread, very regional, not terribly strategic. There were a million moving pieces. This is a very focused, intentional, high-risk program.” 

Crown called the organization an exchange rather then a foundation because she wanted funding to be just one facet of its work. The organization conducts frequent challenges to explore areas where philanthropy might be able to make a difference. 

“Our challenge model is a cohort approach,” SCE Executive Director Haviland Rummel told me. “When we see a gap or a white space in an area, we try to bring together partners working in the field with researchers to do a deep dive into challenges and opportunities.”

SCE develops close relationships with the organizations it supports, as well as with funding partners like Pivotal Ventures, with which it has worked for several years. Rummel said the two funders share a similar perspective on youth and technology, and how technology is impacting people's mental health. “We’re very closely alligned in terms of thriving youth, and also the emphasis on asset framing and trying to elevate opportunities for young people and technology,” she said.

SCE and Pivotal Ventures have plans beyond the new Harvard Center. The two funders are currently creating a design lab for digital wellbeing that will launch in January. Plans for the new project are still in development and they haven’t settled on a name, but Rummel said the new entity will support organizations developing technologies for digital wellbeing.

Philanthropists, like many of us, may still be catching up with technology and its breathtaking impact on every level of modern society, but Rummel hopes that funders will recognize the importance of initiatives like the Center for Digital Thriving.

“I think that funders often don't see technology as a key program area,” she said. “But understanding and funding good work around preparing people to develop better relationships with technology will touch all different types of portfolios — whether it's education, youth development, or workforce readiness, for example. Technology is here to stay.”