About Free To BE

What is Free To Be?

Free To Be is a research-based positive body image program for youth in grades six to eight. Free To Be empowers boys and girls to reach their full potential by developing media literacy awareness, cultivating individual strengths, building resilience to social pressures that impact body image, and nurturing a positive social environment.

Sessions are interactive and include small and large group discussions, role-playing, brainstorming, sharing, and positive activism activities. Free To Be is taught by a trained facilitator in 6 sessions or can be adapted into shorter presentations. 

Program Objectives

Understand: We equip youth to recognize nuanced or limiting messages and constraining stereotypes in our social environments, and to understand how such messages and stereotypes deeply impact us.

Critique: We equip youth to develop a critical thinking stance towards constraining stereotypes or limiting messages that are depicted in the media and social environments. Youth also learn how to positively combat and reframe negative self-limiting beliefs or actions into more positive, realistic, and healthy perspectives.

Empower: We equip adolescents to develop a thriving, positive body image through:

(a) engaging in gratitude and strength-based exercises that create personal and social experiences that teach, support, and enhance self-awareness and self-understanding;

(b) increasing one’s sense of authentic identity and freedom from constraining stereotypes.

(c) providing students with critical thinking skills to create social environments not premised on appearance.