Welcome Future Builders, Partners, Trainees, and School Subscribers to our FAQs
THENCE helps Community Leaders, Stakeholders, Schools, and Trainers build their own virtual health equity infrastructure.
How do you build or virtualize "Health, wellness and EQUITY Infrastructure" for schools?
We offer basic through advanced solutions as a service to meet the complex health, wellness and equity needs for schools and their community members. We take a holistic approach. This means we have evidence-backed processes that are research-informed, while offering a community-based participatory approach to actively engage and accompany communities on their journey in determining what they may need for professional development (PD). This professional development may include diversity, equity and inclusion training, wellness, health, and personal readiness for teaching social, emotional learning curricula. We work with all budgets, and a variety of funding options.
Our school wants a PD, equity, wellness, or health equity needs assessment, can THENCE do this?
No. However, we can and will train your designated community planners or leaders on the best tools to assess community needs for health, wellness and equity infrastructure, which include evaluating needs for professional development, DEI training, Social Emotional Learning curricular readiness, Health Educator readiness and development needs, as well as methods for identifying other major health, equity and wellness infrastructure gaps. We can also offer one on one coaching for your community's needs assessment planner. We strongly believe this is the better way to conduct school needs assessment for health, equity, and wellness. Why? Because, when outsiders alone conduct a need assessment, many daily, structural, and institutional challenges remain unrecognized, and this leads to wasted time and money. Because outside consultants have limited exposure to the community, and carry their own blindspots or biases, we strongly suggest that any assessment needs planning be conducted with a planner who is from the community. Having mentioned that the coaching relationship is one of learning to gain these skills and immediately apply them with expert oversight. To parahrase an Ugandan Proverb:
If you give a person a fish, you feed them for a day. If you teach this person how to fish, you feed them for a lifetime.
Are you a provider of NCHEC or CHES/MCHES credits and CEs to schools or individuals?
Yes. We help individuals and communities understand the activities of NCHEC which stands for National Credentialing for Health Education Certification. We help individuals or learning communities through the process of exam preparation for NCHES, as passing this exam is needed to gain CHES/MCHES certification. We also provide the continuing education individuals need to maintain health specialist status so they may be an infrastructure builder through the Nationally recognized Certification NCHEC. If you are looking to build or maintain your CHES or MCHES CE credits look no further we can help click here.
What if we as an institution have no need or interest in NCHEC? Can you still support us in bringing better health equity to our learning community?
Yes. We recognize that some communities simply wish to get started right away on building health equity and do not have individuals interested in CHES/MCHES certification. Also, standardized tests and the time commitment to certification pathways are not suited to all individuals. For this reason we have created two options. We can provide schools with PD that is consistent and certified by a health education and a professional development specialist. This content can be immediately deployed to meet Health Education, DEI, Article IX, and other specific professional development goals.
Are you a provider of Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI) and Article IX training?
Yes. We provide several services and a marketplace of trainingsproduct options that meet Diversity Equity and Inclusion training needs as well as Article IX training, and Certified Worksite Wellness development. We are also adding our own curated training that enhances the learning goals and outcomes of DEI training. It is called SABAR Books, which helps educators select anti-bias, anti-racist books for their libraries, AND better curate existing libraries. Our offerings vary from monthly subscriptions with virtual individualized content, to group in-person training options. In addition, our new product stream REAL REELS brings DEI and Article IX training to the everyday routine of educators and administrators through entertaining 3-minute-long interactive videos. The REAL REELS, is in BETA testing at the moment. If you wish to become a BETA tester, please indicate this on the form below.
Some schools need more health equity infrastructure and support, do you do a needs assessment?
No. What we do instead is facilitate needs assessment by our train-as you go coaching processes with your designated community planners on the many tools that allows learning communities to self-assess their needs for health equity building. We also provide access to these tools, and coach a community's needs assessment journey. We strongly believe this is the better way to conduct needs assessment. Why? Because, when outsiders do a need assessments many of the community's daily, structural, and institutional challenges go unrecognized, usually due to the consultants' own biases. It's the old expression that adheres to the idea that teaching a person how to fish, is many times better than selling them a fish.
We have very specific needs, but I am not sure how/if they will be met by THENCE services and products.
We understand your concern. AND, you don't have to make the decision to subscribe or purchase products in isolation. We actually prefer a virtual meeting with you and your team to get to know your goals, build a relationship and help your find the best pathway.
Why do you suggest a virtual meeting session, rather than an in-person one?
Prior to the global pandemic of Covid and school shut-downs many schools conducted all business, training and conversations with in-person meetings. The pandemic changed all of those routines. We find that we can save our clients both time and money by conducting virtual meetings to help guide their choice of service and product. Plus, our team members are geographically dispersed across North America, and the globe.
We need classroom virtualization, or a virtual Learning Management System (LMS) to help our teachers and administrators attain their professional development, can you help with this?
Yes. This is very much within the scope of what we are able to provide. Book an appointment today with a THENCE Partner specialist.
Our school community is in a rural settings. We don't have a strong or consistent internet service, and laptops are rare, does this mean we can't partner with THENCE?
Partnering is still possible! We can provide everything needed to begin the important community work of outreach, meetings, coaching, advocacy, content development and deployment through a smartphone app. If community members have access to a smartphone then they can use our tools for program planning, building community-based participatory professional development, or subscribing to our content as a service professional development content.
Okay, so what are these REAL REALS from THENCE that I keep seeing mentioned above and on the DEPLOY page?
THENCE REAL REELS are a new product category of PD, that chunks Professional Development into micro-training sessions that last no longer than a coffee break. They were designed in a collaborative space with subject matter experts who know how to deliver a given the topic area, a dramaturgic expert, an educator well versed in cognitive science, universal design, accessibility, and at least one individual certified in CHEC with a deep understanding of how adults learn and absorb new knowledge and skills.
Why would our learning community need REAL REALS, what are the benefits?
REEL REALS were conceived to end a key complaint that professional development is a boring nuisance. Moreover, PD is often thought of as repetative, its delivery outdates and current paradigms do not deliver a transformational learning experience. On top of this in the past three years educators feel 'burnt out' due to the global pandemic, trying to juggle virtual classrooms, covid rules, and other kids and family members at home. Of all the downsides of the pandemic, there has been one upside, and that is the recognition that time is our most precious asset, and that the last thing we want to do is waste time.
We already have educators in our school doing health education, gender equity and anti-racism training, and these teachers do not feel we need anything else, but parents disagree.
We often find that that despite having funded good training programs many schools still face problems, and it is not uncommon for staff members or students to report microaggressions, discriminatory or differenctial discipline practices, a perpetuation of stereotypes, ignorance around neurodiversity, gender, LGBTQ identity, race/ethnicity, and in worse-case scenarios even harassment. Unfortunately, a single training does little to affect prevailing attitudes, beliefs and behaviors in a school community. This, in fact, is the major reason why we built our platform, and also why we hope to build your infrastructure as an ecosystems approach to tackling structural problems that negate health equity. Your current teachers who are responsible for DEI, health education, anti-racism and equity trainings will not feel replaced, instead, they will be better equipped and supported with an orientation to building the suitable infrastructure with our dynamic, integrated tools.
THENCE.us offer service plus product bundles to help learning community thrive with increased belonging, wellness and health improvement. We help coach organizations toward setting achievable their goals and consistently meeting needed professional development outcomes. THENCE Specialists have expertise in several content and infrastructure solution areas, book your appointment to discuss your institute's goals today.
