True Kids 1

In 2023, TK1 created our first digital-health initiative, Kids, Screens & Phones (KSP), which remains the only program of its kind in NM. KSP has now taught thousands of NM students in classrooms from Santa Fe to Questa, and reached hundreds of parents with ideas and strategies for how youth and families might more consciously integrate screens in their lives. OEF funds will allow us to deepen and strengthen our digital-health programs. We’ll build on KSP by creating and offering an Outdoor Digital Detox Program (ODDP), both as a summer camp and as a school-year offering. Driven by regular demand from families in our community, the ODDP will fuse the informative games and lessons of our KSP curriculum with new outdoor-recreation activities for participating youth. We will not preach screen abstinence, but rather give youth new ideas for reducing their digital reliance. From our experience and the wider evidence base, we know that the best antidote to screen addiction is time spent outside. Our ODDP will not ban technology, but instead will open dialogue on screens and our relationships with them, including means of self control, new techniques that promote taking technology breaks, and proven ideas to #put-it-down. This program will help youth have dynamic outdoor experiences that ideally come to replace screentime – swapping indoor (screen) time for outdoor time. Participants will learn how to fish and hike, be mindful and relax in nature, birdwatch, write and draw and mural, knit and sew, and perform some basic gardening. Our campers will spend an hour every day preparing and eating meals outside, on a fire, a BBQ, an horno, and more. Meals will incorporate local cultural traditions and practices where and when possible – as we know that food preparation itself is a proven technique for reducing screentime. This program will launch as a one-week, all-day summer camp in 2026 and then again in summer 2027. During the 2026-27 school year, we will offer six pre-holiday Mini ODDP Intensives, where we take youth outside for 4 hours on the Friday before an extended break from school. We know that holidays present significant, unstructured time for youth, who simply require different tools when at home to temper screen-addictive habits. As this is an 18-month pilot, evaluation and reflection are central. We’ll blend quantitative and qualitative measures, including Focus Group discussions with participants and routine video reflection of progress and challenges, to understand program successes and failures. This will allow us to share rigorous, open-access findings with other nonprofits and schools to ideally scale this approach statewide. Anticipated results include: more and more youth gaining the skills and awareness necessary to reduce screen additions and achieve a conscious technology balance; more and more youth exposed to outdoor activities in Taos County that can replace current screentime activity; and strengthening a local nonprofit to better meet the digital needs of addicted and hard-to-reach youth and families.