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In “Stress in America 2023: A Nation Recovering from Collective Trauma,” the American Psychological Association states that 18–34-year-olds struggle with the highest rates of mental illness in the country. We quickly point to the COVID pandemic, with lockdowns and the lack of school structure and interaction, as being an obvious shared experience for this age range. But it goes deeper. This generation has grown up under the specter of school shootings, chaotic political futures, climate instability, and economic uncertainty due to the rise of AI technology. Layer upon that the dopamine-manipulating stream of information fed to their eyeballs through social media, showing “everyone is doing better than me,” or “the world is a scary place,” as they view pictures of war and general acts of human cruelty online. Many are also dealing with economic inequality, racialized violence, and community disinvestment. Trauma accumulates not only from personal experiences but from living inside structures that repeatedly communicate: you are unsafe, you are unseen, you do not belong.
And yet, despair is not the only inheritance. These same young people carry within them extraordinary resilience. We see it daily. There is an unspoken wisdom of families and ancestors who endured histories of dislocation, poverty, and exclusion. The question is how to surface that resilience, give it language, and pass it on as usable tools.
That is the work of Bounce Back Generation (BBG).
Our model is deceptively simple: hire young people from the communities we serve to be peer leaders. We train them in the science of resilience, then support them to share what they learn through media. This means venturing online and using the very platforms that often contribute to isolation and distortion.
In this way, Bounce Back Generation (BBG) is something like a modern-day Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood for TAY-aged youth (Transitional Age 16 to 26). Those programs did more