Grades 6 Through College

Their future is already becoming.

Becoming The Better Youth partners with schools, districts, and youth-focused organizations to create experiences built around the real needs of their students and educators.

Real-world lessons. Real-life stories. Aged down, never dumbed down.

Let’s Talk About Your Students See the Youth Experience

Becoming The Better Youth panel speaking with students in Lawton, Oklahoma

Real voices. Real stories. Real connection. Leaders, speakers, athletes, and entrepreneurs share the lessons they learned the hard way, giving students a chance to see what life beyond their current circumstances can become.

Customized Programs Classroom, grade-level, school-wide, and educator experiences.

Real-World Voices Leaders, speakers, athletes, entrepreneurs, and lived experience.

24,000+ Students Reached Across schools and programs in the United States and Kenya.

Start With Their World

We don’t start with a topic. We start with your students.

Every school has its own culture, challenges, strengths, and priorities. Before we decide what the program should look like, we listen to the people who know those students best.

We meet with administrators, counselors, program leaders, and other key stakeholders to understand what they are seeing, what students are facing, and what the school hopes to accomplish. From there, we build the experience around the needs in front of us.

Listen Understand what the school is seeing, hearing, and trying to address.

Understand Look at the students, staff, environment, goals, and real-world challenges shaping the experience.

Build Create a program around the needs identified, rather than forcing the school into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.

Connect Bring in the speakers, leaders, athletes, and lived experiences that best connect with the students in front of us.

Becoming The Better Youth meeting with school administration

The conversation comes first. The topic may be bullying, body image, leadership, suicide prevention, confidence, or something entirely different. We determine that after we understand the school, not before.

The lesson stays strong. The delivery changes.

Our speakers include leaders, entrepreneurs, coaches, athletes, and people whose lives have required them to learn difficult lessons the hard way. Many of them also speak, train, and coach adults in professional settings.

When they step into a school, we do not strip those ideas of their substance. We shape the language, examples, stories, and interaction around the age and needs of the students in the room.

Respect Their Intelligence

Students know when adults are talking at them instead of talking with them.

Make It Relevant

The principle may be universal. The example has to make sense in their world.

Tell the Real Story

Success matters more when students understand the setbacks, choices, and work that came before it.

Give Them Something Usable

Inspiration matters. A thought, tool, decision, or next step they can carry home matters even more.

Becoming The Better You team with Adrian Lunsford during a youth program in Lawton, Oklahoma

The same caliber of voices. A different room. Professional speakers, entrepreneurs, leaders, athletes, and mentors bring their experience directly to the next generation.

We are not trying to turn students into tiny executives. We are helping them recognize that the principles of leadership, resilience, responsibility, confidence, and growth already belong to them too.

Perspective

Sometimes the person on the stage once sat in a seat just like theirs.

Dr. Ruben West grew up attending one of Topeka’s toughest high schools. Today, he can return to students from communities like his own and show them that where they begin does not have to determine where they finish.

Lived Experience

Some stories begin in the same hallways students walk every day.

Regina Platte can speak honestly about being a pregnant teenager walking the halls of a Topeka high school and about the life she continued building afterward.

Dr. John E. Avocado with Adrian Lunsford

Potential

“You have so much potential” is not always the compliment adults think it is.

Dr. John E. Avocado knows what it is like to repeatedly hear about the potential others saw in him while still trying to figure out what to do with it himself. That experience gives him a different way to talk with students who are still becoming.

Becoming The Better You team behind the scenes at a youth event

Different Stories

There is no single road to becoming.

Members of the BTBY community bring stories involving bullying, instability, incarceration, financial struggle, adversity, leadership, entrepreneurship, athletics, personal growth, and second chances. The right story depends on the students in the room.

The message is not: “Look how successful I am.” The message is: “My story was still being written too.”

When students can see the space between someone’s struggle and who they became, possibility becomes a little easier to imagine for themselves.

Familiar Struggles Students hear from people whose lives were not always neat, predictable, or easy.

Visible Possibility They get to see what can exist on the other side of choices, growth, support, and persistence.

Human Connection The goal is not simply to speak at students. It is to create moments where students feel seen, heard, and capable of more.

Built for the room you actually have.

Some schools need a focused classroom conversation. Others need a grade-level program, a full-school experience, multiple campuses, or support for educators and administrators.

We have delivered programming both on-site and off-site, and we can combine student-facing experiences with professional development for the adults supporting them.

The shape can change. The goal does not: create a meaningful experience that meets people where they are and gives them something useful to carry forward.

01

Classroom

Smaller, focused experiences that allow for deeper conversation, interaction, and connection.

02

Grade Level

Programming designed around the developmental needs and shared experiences of a particular student group.

03

School-Wide

Large-scale experiences that bring a shared message and energy to an entire school or multiple campuses.

04

Educators & Administrators

Custom professional development and training for the adults who support students every day.

Not sure what format makes sense yet?

Good. You do not need to know before contacting us. The conversation comes first, and together we can determine what best fits your students, staff, goals, schedule, and available resources.

Talk With BTB Youth

24,000+ Students Reached And every number represents a young person with a story, a future, and possibilities still being written.

2 Continents And Growing What began in U.S. schools is now reaching young people beyond our borders.

Different communities. One commitment.

The place may change. The students may change. The challenges may change. Our job remains the same: listen first, understand what is needed, and build the experience around the young people we are there to serve.

BTBY Youth working with students in Topeka

Close to Home

Impacting young people where they are.

Across the United States, BTBY Youth has worked alongside schools, educators, and communities to create experiences shaped around the students in front of us.

BTBY Youth outreach with children in Africa

Across the Globe

And the impact keeps traveling.

The mission has now crossed an ocean, carrying that same commitment to young people in communities around the world.

Different communities. Different challenges. One commitment: meet young people where they are and help them see what is possible from here.

Impact is more than attendance.

The numbers help show the scale of the work, but they are not the whole story. What matters most is what students carry with them after the room empties.

Sometimes Impact Looks Like This

One student. One conversation that stayed with him.

Numbers can show the scale of a program. Sometimes the clearest measure of impact is what happens after a student goes home.

After one BTB Youth event, a parent contacted the school and shared that her son came home, told her he loved her, and said he was going to really try to become his best self because that was what his future self would want.

That did not show up on an attendance sheet. It was not a statistic collected at the door. It was a young person carrying an idea from the room into his own life.

That is why connection matters.

The goal is not to create a temporary burst of motivation. It is to create moments, ideas, and conversations that students may continue thinking about long after the program ends.

From School Leadership

Dr. Herb Monroe

Superintendent · Lawton Public Schools

Hear directly from Dr. Monroe about the BTB Youth experience in Lawton, Oklahoma, where programming reached approximately 6,000 middle and high school students across six schools in two days.

Youth Experience

Hear what the experience looked like from their side of the room.

Real feedback from the people who experienced BTB Youth firsthand.

In Their Own Words

The best evidence comes from the people who were there.

Another perspective on what happens when the right message meets the right room.

Every school is different. Every group of students is different. That is exactly why we believe the experience should be built with you, not simply brought to you.