We were lucky to catch up with Jay Levin recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Jay thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

My current nonprofit project, EQuip Our Kids! is the most meaningful even though I am best known and respected for founding the LA Weekly newspaper and growing it to be the largest urban weekly in the country – one that had a powerful and positive effect on life in Los Angeles during its heyday.

One of the areas of our journalism coverage – and of my lifetime’s reporting – was the human development movement. Nine years ago I founded EQuip Our Kids! to promote nationally an education curriculum known as Social Emotional Learning, because in all my experience in the human development realm I saw it as the most profound and historic game-changer
for humanity’s epoch-long inability to get along with each other in mutually supportive ways.

Hence a history of endless war, violence, crime, ripoffs, poverty, genocides, rape. addiction, child molestation – you name it, and it is still all around us. With nuclear weapons waiting to be used.by some nutcase leader or accidently.

Social Emotional Learning (SEL), when taught comprehensively from preK-12, teaches kids the skills to manage their inner lives, emotional lives, and relationships with each other in mutually caring and intelligent ways. These skills have enabled many preK–12 students to grow into remarkable and historically-evolved young people. They also helped many kids recover from the mental health crisis brought on by Covid home restraints.

You can see this for yourself in the first video on our website equipourkids.org – and why it’s a loving and historic act to develop many more kids like these.

The backstory is simple. After a life in journalism covering the range of human pains and achievements, and as a student of human behavior and development, I had already developed the belief that almost all human pain comes from a lack of skills – and from actual mal-training in dealing with yourself, each other and life – and NOT from a lack of character,

When I visited some SEL schools and so the behaviors, happiness, self-affirming and relating ways of students who had experienced this learning (plus soaring grades), I decided to launch EQuip Our Kids! as a pro bono marketing agency for SEL to mobilize parents and the public to support SEL in all schools. I saw SEL as a great gift to children – and actually to the potential fate of humanity. Since them EQuip Our Kids! has had a meaningful impact on the growth of this learning (often now called by other names).

Jay, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I grew up in New York City and loved to read. Aside from novels, I particularly liked reading magazine writers who told their stories with exquisite writing. I also enjoyed newspaper columnists with similar gifts.

Married young, I had my first child when 20 and while still in college. I supported the family by delivering mail but really was hoping to get a job at a NY newspaper at which a cousin worked – in part because my fave columnist wrote for it.  He couldn’t get me one, but God intervened and through a circuitous route placed me exactly there when I graduated.

Very shortly I made a mark for myself, including by writing a series about modern therapy practices being used in addiction treatment. Watching people change over time, raised my first awareness that out pains are from lack of skills – not character. So, I made myself a reporter and then an editor who was willing to defy or look past the ways people do things to the potential ways we could do things. That included everything from creating an investigative series that led to state law changes that finally got the massive smog in California cleaned up, to interviewing some of the leading world figures in the personal growth and human development movement, to galvanizing city plans that supported the poorest LA communities, to film and music coverage with the most mind-opening insightful punch that LA had ever seen.

What do I want people to know? Whether your clients are newspaper readers or new wellness products buyers, or whomever, don’t fall into the consensual trap. Deliver value. Find a setting of original thinking to present it, Hire people with great people skills. Get these skills for yourself. If you haven’t taken a course in nonviolent communication, find one. Seek info that challenges your own beliefs because that brings fresh perspectives and ideas. Go meet the people you avoid. and get to know them.

Beware of mass media and politicians. Shoot for what improves human behavior wherever you can. The most important thing in the world if it’s going to survive, is to support wherever people learn to get along with others like the kids who are fortunate enough to have serious SEL in their schools.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

The LA Weekly early on needed time to build its retail and entertainment base of smaller advertisers, which ultimately it did enmass, with huge success. But in the early days we targeted the movie industry to bolster our needed income even though it historically was both careful and slow in testing new editorial venues.

We knew our strengths. We had the best and most provocative film reviewers LA had ever known and they were already fast-building followers – and talk about them.

So, I took funds from our small marketing budget and bought ads in all the entertainment trade journals that declared loudly: “To you movie companies: If you are NOT in the LA Weekly, you’re REALLY out of it.” I added some keen reader testimonials.

The gamble was would they find us so obnoxiously pretentious that they’d never advertise, or would they check us out and conclude they needed to advertise. Within three months we had almost all the studios and many indies advertising, giving us time to build our retail and other bases.

Moral of story: Put out good products and take risks in marketing it.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

Simple: empower people, praise their good qualities, value their opinions, be a servant leader looking for opportunities for them to learn and grow and contribute even outside their normal roles. Appreciate them. Help them learn. Make sure they’re in the roles that suit them and look to move them to other roles if possible. Look for opportunities to have fun together.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://equipourkids.org
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/levinjay/

Image Credits

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