What We Fund
Donations to the Cocoa Classic go toward closing the gap between what we know about emotional regulation and what actually reaches young people. The science is years ahead of the care. That gap is where we work. We fund the unglamorous middle — the research, training, the materials, and the referrals that decide whether a family who asks for help finds a door that opens. Every dollar meets one test: does this change what happens to a kid? If it doesn't, we don't fund it. And we will publish what we fund.
Where the money goes
Research around Emotional Dysregulation. The upstream work that decides what every clinician downstream is eventually trained to do.
Materials in pediatric offices. Reviewed by clinicians and placed where families wait. Most parents have never had a name for what they're seeing, and without a name there's nothing to raise at an appointment. This reaches them at the moment the conversation is relevant.
Training for primary care. Through organizations that already do this well, including the REACH Institute, which has taken roughly ten thousand clinicians through child mental health curricula.
Presentations to therapists and school counselors. Reachable through professional associations and continuing education. A counselor who can recognize dysregulation and teach two or three distress tolerance skills changes what happens in that room — and that requires no clinical credential.
A referral map. Because everything above creates a problem if there's nowhere to send a young person. This is harder than it sounds: many therapists list DBT among their approaches, but far fewer run the full model the trials tested.
These are the pieces nobody else is paying for - too small for the institutions, too unglamorous for most donors, and the reason a family can do everything right and still find no door open. This list will sharpen as we learn.
Shoes That Fit
The Cocoa Classic started with shoes. Collin noticed children at a local food bank wearing worn-out ones and decided to do something about it, and that work has put new shoes on the feet of more than 1,600 kids.
We continue to support Shoes That Fit in the Atlanta community — part of what we do in Collin's memory, alongside our primary work in youth mental health.
