Core Capacities: The Building Blocks of Human Flourishing: A breakthrough framework for creating mental health.
Redefining Youth Mental Health: From Treating Illness to Creating Wellbeing
Just as nutrition, exercise, sleep, and social connection are the building blocks of physical health, Core Capacities are foundational elements for youth mental health and wellbeing. This framework represents a shift from traditional mental health treatment or promotion towards mental health creation–equipping young people and systems to actively generate good mental health.
The Three Core Capacities
Capacity for Inner Cultivation
Nurturing one’s inner landscape
Supporting young people to pause, turn inward, and tend to their inner landscapes. This capacity helps young people to grow the good and deal with the difficult in their inner worlds, all while cultivating their senses of meaning and wonder.
Relational Capacity
Growing relationships rooted in one’s interconnectedness.
Supporting young people to understand their interconnectedness with all other people and nature, and to value, form, and grow relationships rooted in that understanding. This capacity helps young people connect with things bigger than themselves, create nourishing relationships, and find belonging.
Capacity for Engaged Action
Taking action aligned with one’s values and collective wellbeing.
Supporting young people to purposefully engage with their communities and the systems around them. This capacity helps young people to–individually and together–take positive action aligned with their values and the collective wellbeing of people, society, and our planet.
Proven Impact Across Continents
Core Capacities isn’t just theory—it’s a proven, actionable way for any youth-facing system, organization, or youth leader to integrate inner development into their everyday work:
- In schools: Whole school environments shift towards wellbeing and belonging through collaborative action between students, teachers, parents, and administrators
- In communities: Young leaders lead service projects, drive advocacy, and build peer support networks anchored in inner development
- In families: Parents and caregivers strengthen their bonds and communication with children while supporting their emotional development
- In youth-serving organizations: Staff develop skills to create environments where young people flourish
- In healthcare systems: Youth-serving professionals integrate holistic, youth-friendly practices into service delivery
This approach builds on more than eight years of collaborative research and learning across India, Kenya, Colombia, the U.S., and other countries, including multiple RCTs.
From Personal Development to Systems Transformation
Core Capacities work at multiple levels to support holistic youth development:
Individual Level:
Young people navigate the inner, social, and environmental dimensions of their lives with meaning, belonging, and hope.
Relational Level:
Young people’s bi-directional connections with peers, families, communities, and nature deepen and strengthen.
Systems Level:
Youth-facing organizations and systems (e.g., education) evolve to support young people’s flourishing.
Societal Level:
Cultural shifts grounded in shared humanity, collective care, and intergenerational collaboration.
Universal Yet Locally Adapted
While the three Core Capacities are universal human needs, their expression adapts to local cultures, traditions, and wisdom. From Indigenous knowledge systems in Kenya to contemplative practices in India, from Colombian community solidarity to American innovation—Core Capacities honor both heritage and contemporary research.
Complementing Traditional Mental Health Services
Core Capacities work alongside traditional mental health approaches, providing:
- Prevention: Building foundational wellbeing before problems develop
- Enhancement: Strengthening the effectiveness of therapeutic interventions
- Sustainability: Creating long-term capacity for resilience and growth
- Accessibility: Offering tools that young people and communities can implement themselves
Ready to Support Youth Flourishing Through Core Capacities?
Whether you’re a young person seeking personal growth, a parent wanting to support your child’s development, an educator developing student wellbeing, a youth worker expanding your toolkit, or a policymaker interested in evidence-based approaches to youth development—Core Capacities offer practical pathways to support young people in flourishing.
citiesRISE and a coalition of partners are building and piloting three tools for spreading Core Capacities:
- Measure: Helping track progress along young people’s journeys cultivating the Core Capacities.
- Practices Library: Helping more effectively cultivate Core Capacities through a community-generated, curated library of evidence-based, adaptable practices.
- Tech-Enabled Learning Platform: Helping inform continual improvement and aggregate evidence to understand what works for which young people in which contexts, as well as the facilitators and inhibitors of inner development.
Get in touch with us to be a part of this movement.