Project Details

The Anti-Bullying Project is a multi-phase middle school school transformation initiative built around bullying prevention. It incorporates the books Bullies, Blaze, and Bravery and Venturing Together: Empowering Students to Succeed, Inner-Strength and Professional Development presentations, and culminates with a school-wide video project.

This program can feature either live presentations or videos and is delivered in three intentional steps:

The Launch:

For Students: A high-impact Inner-Strength presentation or video about activating our internal power (internal locus of control) and choosing resilience under peer duress. The session covers how to access your power as described in the book Bullies, Blaze, and Bravery; it also explores evidence-based practices to deal with bullying and work to minimize it in their school.

For Staff: A training session or video based on Venturing Together: Empowering Students to Succeed, to empower teachers and other staff to foster an environment of inclusion, caring, and attention to students.

The Books:

For Students: Reading and discussion of Mary Helen Rossi’s Bullies, Blaze, and Bravery throughout the school to serve as a shared literary baseline for students to find their power to transform fear into strength, access empathy, and stand strong against bullying.

For Staff: Educator William Rossi’s Venturing Together: Empowering Students to Succeed delivers his SEL-aligned, strengths-based teaching approach. Teachers learn practical orientations and tools they can use to better understand their students – how they learn and what they need for success – so they can venture together into learning.

Project Overview:

This Social Emotional Learning (SEL)-aligned two or three-month project is run by teachers or counselors to reinforce the concept of self-reliance and champion anti-bullying with the intention of systematically building a safe, equitable school environment.

The project consists of:

  • students and staff reading their respective books
  • the Inner-Strength Presentation (live or video)
  • a Professional Development session
  • the all-school writing/video project

For Students:

The all-school video project fosters belonging and inclusion, and augments student voice and agency.

  • Students within each class form small groups to share their thoughts and experiences about bullying.
  • Students individually write short stories.
  • One group from each class then collaborates to combine the class stories and create a short video with their thoughts and ways their school can actively deter bullying.
  • The class videos are edited to create an all-school video.

For Teachers: For the first three months after the PD session, teachers meet to share their experiences and ideas about the strengths-based approach.

CASEL Competencies and Safety Benchmarks

This project maps directly to CASEL competencies and school safety benchmarks. Rather than the school reacting to bullying behavior, this approach equips students with the self-management skills to prevent bullying from the inside out while they build resilience across all aspects of their lives.

School Site License

This project is offered as a bundled “School Site License” which includes either the workshops or the two videos , the appropriate number of copies of each book, and forever digital access to the project philosophy and curriculum. The project cost is available upon request.

For Administrators and Grantwriters

Visit the For Schools page for an abbreviated project summary and information related to funding.