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. Here's what that means in practice.
Where the money goes
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. We'll publish what we fund.
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.
