Amala Foundation’s Healing Centered Principal Cohort program aims to foster personal and collective growth within school districts through experiential sessions that prioritize wellness, stress management, mindfulness, healing-centered practices, and community building, all with a goal to serve as an antidote to burnout. Amala staff provides the necessary support to help participants identify their professional challenges while also prioritizing their well-being. Additionally, we equip participants with new tools to implement in their work within their school communities.
Through Amala’s professional development programs, participants can enhance their ability to build healing-centered communities by embarking on their own personal healing-centered journey. Our program provides an opportunity to connect with like-minded professionals and develop a supportive professional network. Participants can also create a context for renewal and regeneration within a professional cohort, gain collective professional knowledge and wisdom, and learn simple facilitation strategies that support team building, communication, decision-making, and problem-solving. Considering the high cost of administrator turnover across the nation, our innovative programs have been shown to mitigate signs of burnout for administrators. A recent high school participant shared, “There were daily moments when I was ready to quit. Amala is part of the reason why I did not leave and why my staff did not lose a principal.”
Connect with Amala Foundation for more information at info@amalfoundation.org
READ: Impact of Amala’s Healing-Centered Series
A small study with Austin ISD Principals
Chelsea Cornelius, Ph.D. Recent national research by the RAND Corporation indicates that teachers and principals report worse well-being than other working adults in the pandemic era, including higher levels of job-related stress, depression, and burnout. Eighty-five percent of principals experience frequent job-related stress, citing their staff’s mental health and well-being as one of their top stressors (Steiner et al., 2022).