About LifeBST

LifeBST is an initiative of Families Renewed, Inc., a faith-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in York, Pennsylvania.

Mission

LifeBST is not a mental health treatment program. It is an educational behavioral skills framework designed to help young people flourish.

Schools play a vital role in preparing students for successful lives. Just as they intentionally teach academic knowledge and intellectual skills, they can intentionally teach the behavioral skills that support healthy relationships, responsible decision-making, emotional regulation, resilience, purpose, and lifelong flourishing.

LifeBST does not replace parents, counselors, psychologists, social workers, or mental health professionals. It complements these essential roles, providing universal behavioral skills instruction grounded in an integrated body of scientific evidence.

The purpose of LifeBST is not to treat pathology, but to develop the behavioral skills that help young people thrive before many problems emerge.

Families Renewed

Families Renewed, Inc. was founded in 2013 as the American Family Crisis Ministry, Inc., to help children and families in crisis. It works in three areas that overlap more often than they appear to: homelessness, self-harm and suicide, and the aftermath of child abuse. A family in one of these situations is frequently in another as well, and the organization was built on the view that they are better addressed together than separately.

LifeBST grew out of the second of those areas and has become the organization’s largest undertaking.

Families Renewed, Inc. is a faith-based organization, and LifeBST is being built accordingly: the framework is intended to support a family of versions, developed first in a secular edition that any school can adopt without adopting anyone’s convictions. A faith-based version is in development, with versions for community organizations, the military, and veterans anticipated. The framework beneath them is the same. See The Foundation of Faith.

Why LifeBST exists

Behavioral skills — noticing what you feel, sitting with discomfort without making it worse, repairing a relationship after you have damaged it, asking for what you need — are usually taught only to people who have already reached a crisis, and usually only after they have found their way to a clinician. Most people never do.

LifeBST exists on a straightforward premise: these skills are teachable, the evidence that they are teachable is extensive, and there is no good reason to reserve them for the few who end up in treatment. Schools reach nearly every child, for twelve years, during exactly the developmental window when these capacities form. No other institution comes close to that reach.

Leadership

Bruce R. Norton is the founder of Families Renewed, Inc. and serves as its Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. He was first trained as a peer counselor at fourteen, becoming the youngest volunteer answering calls at a suicide hotline outside Baltimore, Maryland. He has since been trained in post-traumatic stress disorder, acute stress disorder, Critical Incident Stress Debriefing, and Psychological First Aid, and served on a CISD team in Baltimore.

In 2015 he agreed to raise a young girl whose mother had died when she was small and whose father was no longer able to care for her. What eventually helped her was not a diagnosis or a prescription but a set of skills for handling distress, learned slowly and practiced for years. She entered college in August 2021, free of self-harm and managing without psychotropic medication.

That experience is the origin of LifeBST. If the skills were what worked, and if they can be taught, the question is why a child should have to reach crisis before anyone teaches them.

LifeBST is developed with the support of an advisory board of licensed therapists, educators, and other professionals working in the disciplines the framework draws on.

Community

Families Renewed, Inc. holds the Mason-Dixon Ride for Life each year — a motorcycle ride and gathering held for the prevention of suicide and self-harm in children and young adults. It brings together riders, families, local vendors, live music, and mental health professionals, and it is one of the ways the work behind LifeBST is supported and made visible in the community.

The ride is growing into the Mason-Dixon Festival of Life. Details for both will be published as they are confirmed.