In 2002, Brookline Center Clinical Director Henry White, who served as consulting psychiatrist to the Brookline schools, began working with Brookline school leaders to plan and pilot the Brookline Resilient Youth Team. This became the original bryt intervention, at Brookline High School, beginning in 2003-04. In 2006, the neighboring town of Wellesley initiated the Wellesley High Bridge. Between 2008-9 and 2012-13, fourteen additional high schools launched their own versions of bryt.
As replication continued, the Brookline Center developed infrastructure to support schools in implementing the bryt intervention. The first annual bryt Symposium was held in 2010, and soon after, Katherine Houle became bryt’s first Network-level staff member in 2011. At that time, bryt and Brookline Center leaders began thinking explicitly about equity for students and families from diverse communities, racial and ethnic backgrounds, and income levels. Between 2013 and 2015, bryt gathered the data for its first multi-school evaluation study, which entailed development of a 5-year strategic plan focused on expansion in Massachusetts, along with the creation of infrastructure, tools, processes, and sustainable funding for the team. The expansion of the bryt National Team from 2016 onwards led to dramatic increases in the number of schools implementing bryt, more than tripling (from 40 to 137) between 2016 and 2019.
In 2019, the Brookline Center worked with a consulting partner to initiate bryt’s next strategic plan, which reaffirms our commitment to bringing bryt to scale in Massachusetts, while simultaneously expanding nationally. This led to implementation of the model in more than 55 schools outside of Massachusetts, with concentrations in Oregon and New York’s Hudson Valley region. Following a boost in funding from grants and legislative allocations, 2/3 of all Massachusetts public high school students now attend a school that offers bryt if they need it.
