Making Caring Common at HGSE

Making Caring Common, launched in 2013 at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, supports parents, caregivers, and educators in raising children who care for others and for the common good.

By innovatively combining research, theory, the wisdom of practitioners, and strategic communications, we bring fresh, energizing, and evidence-based resources and activities to schools and parents that develop in children empathy, self-awareness, a commitment to fairness and justice, and other key moral and emotional capacities. We also work with the national media to elevate crucial conversations and to provide guidance about how to raise moral and emotionally healthy children.

Given the problems and perils now besetting our country, including spikes in bigotry and hate crimes, escalating gun violence, fierce political polarization, and widespread public hostility, we believe there is nothing more important that we can do than to raise children who care about others, their communities, and our collective well-being.

Our vision is a world in which children:

• treat people well, including those who are different from them in background and character;
• come to understand and seek fairness, equity, and justice;
• develop the kinds of sturdy, caring relationships that support their own and others’ mental health and flourishing.

We believe that children with these capacities will become strong family members and friends and constructive community members and citizens who can strengthen our democracy, mend the fractures that divide us, and work together to solve our country’s urgent problems.