Starting Catalyst
This past school year, I’ve been thinking a lot about what actually makes school feel like a place where you belong.
I’m talking about the kind of environment where students don’t feel like they’re just going from class to class, but actually feel seen, included, and connected.
That’s what led me to start working on something I’m calling Catalyst.
Catalyst is a student-led project focused on understanding and improving how connected students feel at school. At its core, it looks at loneliness and belonging not as personal failings or individual issues, but as patterns that are shaped by school environments and everyday interactions.
I’m not treating this as a finished program or a polished solution. Right now, it’s in its earliest stage: listening.
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Over the past year, I’ve been shaping the idea and trying to figure out what it would really take to understand student experiences in a meaningful way. Instead of guessing, I wanted to start by getting real input from students themselves.
To kick things off, I created a short Google Form with up to eight questions to get honest reflections on what helps students feel included, what makes school feel isolating, and what kinds of changes might make things better.
The next step is to reach out to middle and high school teachers, share the form, and collect student responses from different school settings. My hope is that this will help build a clearer picture of what connection and belonging actually look like from the student perspective — not just in theory.
Right now, Catalyst is still in its foundation stage. It’s driven more by curiosity than by conclusions. But that feels like the right place to start.
Before designing any system or solution, it’s worth really understanding the experiences it’s supposed to support.
P.S. “Catalyst” is really just a placeholder name for now. It captures the idea of sparking change, but I don’t see it as final. If you have other ideas
