The concept behind Brooklyn Raney’s work is simple: Every young person needs at least one trusted adult in their life in order to reach his or her full potential.
The idea, gleaned from more than a decade in school administration, took hold for Raney ’07 during a community meeting about suicide prevention at Kimball Union Academy, the New Hampshire boarding school where she served as dean of students.
“It dawned on me that we were spending all this time talking about the problems of suicide, sexual assault, and substance abuse, but not enough time talking about actual prevention efforts, like relationship building and creating community connections,” Raney says.
Around the same time, in 2017, the ripple effect of the #MeToo Movement had made educators wary of forming relationships with students for fear of their intentions being misinterpreted, explains Raney. Trainings during this time often focused on legal boundaries and “a scare-tactic approach,” she says. “I recognized educators needed to be trained in how to develop and sustain healthy, boundaried relationships with students, because those relationships are essential to the academic and emotional development of young people.”
Using her experience as an educator and a parent, along with her theater background (she majored in theater at Colgate and went on to earn a master’s in educational theater at New York University), Raney developed a training program for her staff at Kimball. Her dynamic, humor-infused presentations provided strategies for developing meaningful relationships with young people while avoiding boundary crossing and burnout.
“Too many educators are depleting their wallets and their wellness in order to be there for kids,” Raney says. “By learning how to set the right boundaries, educators can do this work safely and for a long time.”
She distilled her teachings into a book, One Trusted Adult: How to Build Strong Connections & Healthy Boundaries with Young People, published in 2019. In 2022 her program was awarded a grant from the New Hampshire Department of Education to help Raney bring her tools and training to 125 schools in the state. Today more than 300 schools in 33 states and 17 countries are using the One Trusted Adult curriculum, participating in professional development training in person and online.
And despite spending the bulk of the past few years on the road visiting schools and education conferences, Raney also made time to be a student herself. This past May, she earned a doctorate in education from the University of Pennsylvania after successfully defending her dissertation on a familiar topic: teacher-student relationships.
One popular takeaway from Raney’s trainings is the importance of “two-minute moments,” quick check-ins between adolescents and adults to ensure the young person feels consistently supported while also fostering their independence.