• Identifies

    Teens or adults with need for emotional support

  • Recruits

    Them into support groups as they reach out and ask for help

  • Generates

    Mutual commitment to provide mental health resources to students

  • Improves

    Parent-teen communication, a goal of No Child Left Behind

  • Provides

    Statistics for use in getting future grant funding

Find out what a typical school day with
Susie Vanderlip is like.

Susie’s Four Straight A’s Approach


Susie’s one-woman theatrical LEGACY OF HOPE® program for school assemblies and teen conferences delivers an unparalleled message about motives, choices, consequences and emotional issues that interfere with healthy and successful lives. Susie Vanderlip has an exceptional ability to understand and communicate about emotions and the part they play in adolescent decision-making. She conveys insights and revelations to every audience through the perceptive and unprecedented entertainment in LEGACY OF HOPE®.

Susie has the ability to create an immediate and deep bond with youth through her sincerity, honesty, and openness. Teens laugh, cry and identify with her characters, seeing their friends, families and even themselves in their heartfelt stories.

You are guaranteed to be able to “hear a pin drop” in this program. Teens and adults grasp critical messages about healthy choice, character, values, emotional wisdom, empowered leadership, successful living and profound insights into the dangerous obstacles in today’s world…

How damaging alcohol and drug abuse is on the user's friends and family as well as themselves.

How to reach out for help for depression and suicidal thoughts.

How addictive and dangerous self-harm/cutting is and how to get help.

How freedom from gang life is possible.

How teen pregnancy and AIDS can stem from loneliness, low self-esteem.

How grief can look like anger and an 'attitude'; and that healing and hope are possible.

How effective leadership and high achievement require empathy, service to others, and life balance.


Find out the what are the REAL needs of your teens. National statistics are great, but what about the students in your school.

Who really does need a support group to tackle a drug or alcohol problem? Reach the many teens that are ravaged by depression, excess stress, even suicidal thoughts from family problems to too much pressure to achieve. Discover which teens harbor such Hopelessness that they are enraged and ready to explode in violence towards a friend, a sibling or a rampage at school. Reach the suffering youth who feel such worthlessness because a parent has abandoned them, is a drunk, abusive, unbearably critical, that a teen cannot focus in class and learning is irrelevant in the midst of mere survival.

From peer helping, to service clubs, sober and drug free programs and more.


Invite community leaders, school superintendents, mental health professionals, faith-based groups, law enforcement, juvenile justice, PTOs, school administrators and parents. This is a powerful opportunity to build consensus within your community.

LEGACY OF HOPE® has the extraordinary capacity to create a common understanding and mutual empathy across cultural, gender, age, religious, and economic boundaries.

Create a moment in time when everyone will together choose not to deny, ignore or minimize serious teen social and emotional issues and, instead, create mutual buy-in to implement solutions.

Survey of Hope statistics drive the point home that today’s teens live in a different, more-complex, ruthless world and need adults to provide protection and solutions with Straight A awareness, accuracy and application.


Everyone is under excess stress today and it influences so many choices. Stress too often leads to reliance upon alcohol, drugs, irresponsible sexuality, self-harm, eating disorders and more for both youth as well as adults. Advanced Placement teens are overwhelmed by expectations from school, parents, college entrance requirements, SAT’s, and a myriad of athletic, volunteer and social commitments. Many youth are secretly paralyzed by stress from trauma at home or on the streets, with no capacity to be mentally present in the classroom. And teachers have no time to explore options.

In Susie’s Stress Management Workshops, teens are utterly amazed to experience a “quiet mind” and awed by relief from performance anxiety, peer and parent pressures. At-Risk teens awaken to a new reality – “I am not a victim. I have choices’. Parents, employees, educators, healthcare professionals all find this participatory workshop a tremendous boost to morale, hope and personal ability to address their stress.

Conversations with Hillview High Students
