Blog | A Brand New Day

On Saturday, February 2, 2013 a most fortuitous event occurred on a private school campus starting in the morning time.

The Brentwood School Parents Association hosted a full day of Parent education on their East Campus. This one-day, all day, event was a unique opportunity for their k-12 parent body to learn from a variety of speakers, authors, and experts who each specialized in issues and topics that we all face in our daily parenting.

Topics included everything: raising resilient children, nutrition and health, drivers education, empowering girls, parenting in a digital world, kids in college, and drug and alcohol abuse. It all began with a keynote speaker, who authored a book, “Born to be Good”.  The day was called Mindful Parenting in Todays World.

It was a day that was joyful, inclusive, and happy.

Maybe best described or if I were to paint a picture, I would tell the story like this. Just as the movie Silver Lining Playbook found its way to the Academy Awards in the middle of a complicated film industry and addressing an underrated issue in a world that generally only believes in what they can see, so did you at Brentwood School give Angels at Risk a platform of innocence amongst all other parenting issues of ages k-12 in a world that has chosen to see the issue of drug and alcohol use and abuse in kids and their families still mostly in darkness.

The best part and probably the simplest way to say it truly, is that this day was in fact a new day for this issue of drug and alcohol prevention education.

The Mindful Parenting Day was clearly a day of heart and connection.

Whether it was the emergency summit in 1997 on a public school campus speaking to our entire community or the event in 2013 on a private school campus speaking to our educational system, the true story of it all is the expansion of heart and the unity of vision embraced in our West Los Angeles community. The prevention education mission of Angels at Risk is all-inclusive, there is room for everybody, there is no segregation. When it comes to mental health issues as we directly saw in the most awesome movie, Silver Lining Playbook, we all have to remember that love is the answer.

Congratulations, we think Brentwood School are heroes, mindful and very brave. They have in fact set a new precedent, platform, and cutting edge format in the educational community.

They innocently reframed an issue mostly in the dark and brought it into the light.

There is so much promise in all of god’s story.

By Susie Spain, Founder