About Us
Our Mission:
Our mission is to nurture interconnection—one thought at a time—so that we can cultivate school communities where kids have reasons to try and places to belong..
We Believe:
🌱 Everyone makes mistakes—students, teachers, and parents.
🌱 Everyone has a deep, deep desire to learn and belong to something greater than themself.
🌱 When kids respectfully manage their challenges by learning and connecting, they thrive.
Our Values:
🌱 Curiosity & Nuance: There is no one-size-fits-all approach. We encourage an open-minded exploration of challenges.
🌱 Resilience & Growth: In an increasingly complex world, perseverance, learning, and adaptability drive outcomes.
🌱 Collaboration & Community: In an increasingly polarized world, interconnection creates the bridge to better outcomes.
We take a human-centered approach to school challenges.
Meet Our Master Gardener:
Charmaine Skepasts, Founder of Growing Humanity
BSc (Chemical Engineering), MBA, BEducation (Math), Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP)
is a chemical engineer, business consultant, and teacher who has seen education from every angle. While working at her sons’ high school, she had the unique opportunity to experience education through multiple lenses: she was a parent, a teacher, and she taught her kids’ friends, as well as her friends’ kids. In the process, she was able to experience firsthand the powerful yet often overlooked dynamic of the parent-student-teacher triad.
Her experience wearing the shoes of the person at the front of the classroom reshaped how she viewed her role as a parent. She came to appreciate:
🌱 The immense responsibility of managing 20 elementary or 100 high school students each day.
🌱 That feedback, when framed well, can guide growth—and not just feel like judgment.
🌱 That well-meaning blaming strategies can unintentionally fuel helplessness in kids.
Over time, she adopted a mindset of humility, characterized by listening more, asking questions before passing judgment, and focusing on empathy and problem-solving. Most of all, she prioritized fostering strong relationships between her children and those responsible for their care—their teachers. In the process, she discovered that when parents and teachers work in sync, kids benefit deeply. And not just some kids—all kids.
From Insight to Impact:
Driven to learn more, Charmaine earned a Master of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, under the leadership of Dr. Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology. It is there that she learned the science of well-being. Under the supervision of Dr. Jeremy Clifton, a world expert on world beliefs, she conducted the first-ever research of its kind at the B.C. Institute of Technology (BCIT), with the support of Dean Kenton Low, to measure the influence of parental messaging on student engagement. Their findings were clear:
🌱 The ways parents talk about learning correlate with the beliefs students have about school.
🌱 Those beliefs correlate with student engagement in the classroom.
🌱 This exploratory research suggests that the messages of parents count.
Why Growing Humanity:
Charmaine Skepasts founded Growing Humanity to spark a different kind of cultural dialogue—one that brings students, teachers, and parents together to reflect on the narratives we carry about school, and how those stories can be reshaped to foster connection, motivation, and growth.
Charmaine brings a rare lens to this work:
🌱 Lived experience as both a teacher and a parent inside the same school.
🌱 Advanced training in positive psychology and educational research.
🌱 A deep, enduring commitment to community, connection, and human development.
