Flourishing: Honed Skills with Ripple Effects

 

Interest in the idea of “human flourishing” has grown in recent years, especially around its relevance to the fields of education, health, and community development. So what exactly is flourishing and what can it mean for you personally and for your community?

 

At Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program, flourishing is defined as “a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good, including the contexts in which that person lives” (VanderWeele, 2025). Flourishing is an ideal we work toward, rather than something we can ever fully achieve. According to Harvard, key areas of flourishing include:

 

1. Happiness and life satisfaction 

2. Physical and mental health 

3. Meaning and purpose 

4. Character and virtue 

5. Close social relationships 

6. Financial and material stability

 

In their daily roles, Acknowledge Alliance resilience consultants provide strengths-based coaching, support groups, social-emotional learning, counseling, and crisis intervention to empower educators with tools to manage stress, nurture relationships, and guide students with compassion and confidence. Our resilience consultants are incorporating human flourishing into school-based practices, resulting in meaningful benefits for both students and teachers.

 

In an August episode of the podcast To The Best of Our Knowledge, Dr. Richard Davidson,  neuroscientist and Director of the Center for Healthy Minds, shared examples of how incorporating simple mindfulness practices boosted the flourishing of teachers and led to significantly improved academic performance in students:
 

RICHARD: So for example, we've done research with public school teachers, and public school teachers are a group that has been really stressed out over the last period of time. It's been exacerbated by COVID. Research shows that in the United States today, roughly 50% of public school teachers are showing clinically significant signs of depression and/or anxiety, so it's a crisis. So we have worked with teachers to help improve the skills of flourishing, and one of the things we do is to invite them to reflect on their purpose in becoming a teacher. We ask them to do this for a minute before they start work, and then we sprinkle it through the day just in one-minute periods. And teachers have reported that this is an elixir for their soul. It gives them vitality, it helps them navigate the adversities that they're confronting, but it only will work if you do it consistently. So you don't have to do a lot of it, but it's important to do it consistently, and what we've shown is if you do this for a month, for five minutes, between four and five minutes a day, it will have demonstrable impact on your flourishing.

STEVE: So I know you've done some research already in the Louisville schools, can you talk about what you found there?
 

RICHARD: Yeah, so we did a project in the Jefferson County school system, which is the public school system in Louisville, Kentucky, and we opened it up to everyone. The majority were teachers, but we had people who worked in the school cafeteria, we had people who were bus drivers. It was open to any person who was paid 50% or more by the Jefferson County Public School District.

STEVE: So how many people total were in this study there, just so I have a sense of scale here?

RICHARD: Approximately 850.

STEVE: Okay, yeah, so that's a lot of people.

RICHARD: Yeah, a lot of people, and then the real kicker for this is by prior agreement with the school system, we obtained the records of students on their academic performance, and we were able to compare the students who were taught by teachers randomly assigned to the flourishing intervention, and we compared them to students who are taught by teachers randomly assigned to a control group. And of course, the students had no idea that there was a study happening…They were just taking tests.

STEVE: And it's not as if the teachers were, you know, preaching the virtues of, you know, contemplative practice. I mean, they were just doing their normal thing

RICHARD: Right, exactly. And we actually found that on standardized tests of language ability and of math ability, the students who were taught by teachers randomly assigned to the flourishing intervention performed significantly better. This is the first time in our knowledge that this has ever been shown, and the sample size for the students is around 14,000. And so this is really been the kind of holy grail of this kind of work, and this ripple effect, we believe, is extraordinarily important.

 

Learn more about flourishing and how it can be scaled up to boost the well-being of entire communities by listening to the full podcast episode or reading the transcript here.

 

 

References

 

Strainchamps, A., & Paulson, S. (Hosts). (2025, August 30). Island of Knowledge: Human Flourishing [Audio podcast episode]. In To the Best of our Knowledge. Wisconsin Public Radio / PRX. Retrieved from https://www.ttbook.org/show/island-knowledge-human-flourishing

 

VanderWeele, T. J. (2025, September). Human Flourishing: An Introductory Framework. The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Retrieved from https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum8886/files/2025-09/HFH.framework.final8%20%28single%20page%20version%29-small.pdf