Submitted by: Team Kids
Written by: Michele Rinehart
Twenty-five years ago, an Orange County fire captain stood among 600 elementary students in Irvine and wondered whether children were ready to help save a life.
The students had learned about Jeremy, a three-year-old boy with a rare heart condition. His family needed help reaching the Mayo Clinic for lifesaving care. The children had no foundations, large checkbooks, or powerful titles. They had coin jars, pancake batter, compassion, and firefighters willing to stand beside them.
They went to work.
Students collected coins and organized a pancake breakfast with Orange County firefighters. Their effort spread across the community. Donations poured in. A major gift closed the funding gap. A local philanthropist offered a private jet, pilot, and fuel. Jeremy reached the Mayo Clinic.
The fire captain watched children accomplish something he had not expected. Their leadership did more than raise money. It changed how adults saw them.
What happened next became the beginning of Team Kids and a question Orange County has helped explore for 25 years:
What happens when adults trust children with real responsibility?
Team Kids grew from this first experience and a belief in children as community assets. Philanthropic partners helped turn one Orange County service project into youth leadership programs reaching more than half a million young people at no cost to students. Children identified community needs, supported charities, worked beside caring adults, and experienced their own power to contribute.
Stories offered powerful reasons to believe. Quiet students found their voices. Children led their peers. Police officers and young people met as teammates.
Then Team Kids asked a harder version of its founding question.
Did the program produce measurable change?
In 2016, the Team Kids Board of Directors made research and evaluation a strategic priority. The decision required humility. Outside researchers would analyze the model, identify limitations, and publish what the evidence supported.
Philanthropy made this step possible. Donors preserved free access while funding data collection, independent evaluation, staff capacity, and improvement. Early school evaluations led Team Kids to Dr. Adam Fine of Arizona State University. Initial surveys grew into multi-site studies, one randomized controlled trial, officer interviews, and peer-reviewed publications.
Team Kids research appears in four peer-reviewed academic journals, including the American Psychological Association’s Psychology, Public Policy, and Law. Drawing from multi-site evaluations, one randomized controlled trial, and officer interviews, this evidence establishes the Team Kids Challenge as an empirically validated youth development and prevention model and helps fuel growing demand.
The original belief no longer rested on stories alone.
The current six-week Team Kids Challenge places young people at the center of community action. It begins with a question: What would you change in your community? Students discuss issues such as hunger, homelessness, animal welfare, children’s health, and support for veterans. They listen to one another, debate priorities, and vote on the issue they most want to address.
Upper-grade students then form a leadership team. They select a nonprofit beneficiary and become young entrepreneurs, designing small businesses through homemade carnival games and activities. They plan, promote, set prices, work together, and raise money. At the end, they become philanthropists, presenting the proceeds to the charity they chose. They experience the full arc of community change: see a need, make a decision, create value, and give it away.
Educators, police officers, firefighters, university students, and community mentors stand beside them.
Adults support. Children lead.
At one participating elementary school, evaluation data showed a striking change. Before the Team Kids Challenge, 35 percent of students strongly believed in their power to make a difference in their community. Afterward, 61 percent did. The share who felt police officers believed in them rose from 28 percent to 58 percent. The share who reported helping make their community better doubled from 18 percent to 36 percent.
Those numbers describe more than confidence. They describe empathy, self-efficacy, and agency. Young people recognized the needs of others, believed in their power to respond, and saw their actions produce visible results.
Published research tested these outcomes through one randomized controlled trial. Findings from this trial supported more than one peer-reviewed analysis. One publication found significant improvement in students’ perceptions of police legitimacy after repeated, positive, non-enforcement interactions with officers through the Team Kids Challenge. It also found perceptions of police legitimacy often begin declining during childhood, with racial differences emerging early.
A separate publication paired results from the same randomized trial with evaluations from six schools in California and New York. The six-school evaluation documented significant gains in Positive Values, Empowerment, and Positive Identity. Analysis of the randomized trial documented gains in Empowerment and Social Conscience.
The survey questions made those academic terms personal. Do I want to help people who are struggling? Do I feel good when I help others? Am I helping make my community better? Do I believe in my power to make a difference?
The answers moved in a positive direction. Young people developed stronger empathy-related attitudes, self-efficacy, social conscience, and positive identity. Participation mattered. Students who felt involved and believed they held useful roles and responsibilities reported greater developmental growth.
Research also examined the adults. Police officers described more opportunities for positive interaction with young people, improved relationships with children, and a positive program experience. Several spoke about seeing children differently and remembering their own place within the community.
The pattern is consistent. Meaningful responsibility builds identity. Service builds belonging. Youth voice deepens participation. Respectful contact strengthens relationships.
Children do not experience schools, neighborhoods, or public institutions equally. Race, income, school resources, and previous experiences with authority shape how young people and institutions see one another. Team Kids does not claim a six-week program repairs structural injustice. Its focused purpose is to create respectful, non-enforcement settings where young people hold meaningful roles, adults listen, and both groups pursue a shared community goal.
Equity begins with access and voice. The Team Kids Challenge takes place during the school day. Students do not need transportation, fees, special connections, or parents with flexible schedules. Leadership is not reserved for the highest-achieving or most outspoken child. Every student receives an invitation to participate.
Long-term follow-up remains a research priority, and real-world school evaluations present challenges in matching every survey. Team Kids reports these limits because responsible philanthropy requires honest reporting, continued learning, and improvement.
Today, the evidence is returning home to Orange County.
Anaheim has become Team Kids’ newest and fastest-growing city partnership. During the 2024–25 school year, students across four Anaheim schools raised $25,201 for more than 10 charities. The Anaheim Cops4Kids Foundation invested $30,000 across 2025 and 2026 to build relationships between children and officers through leadership and service. The Angels Baseball Foundation joined the partnership at Olive Street Elementary. These partners are investing in an Orange County-born model with documented outcomes and a commitment to continued evaluation.
This work matters now. The CDC’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey found 40 percent of U.S. high school students experienced persistent sadness or hopelessness. Team Kids is not a clinical mental health treatment. Its role lies in creating school connection, supportive relationships, responsibility, service, and purpose.
The next research chapter deserves philanthropic support. Continued evaluation, longer-term follow-up, and refinement will deepen understanding of what works, for whom, and under which conditions. Philanthropy will help Team Kids expand access while protecting program quality and evidence.
After 25 years, the strongest case for Team Kids is not a promise of identical transformation for every child. It is a pattern appearing across communities, surveys, one randomized trial, four peer-reviewed publications, and human experience.
Proof lives in the research. It also lives in people.
Jeremy survived. Today, he is 28 and continues to inspire everyone he meets. The Orange County Fire Authority captain who questioned the children’s ability to help became Team Kids’ founding president. The students who organized the first pancake breakfast are now in their 30s, and many lead careers rooted in service.
Their lives are the longest-running evidence of an Orange County idea. When children receive meaningful responsibility, their actions ripple across a lifetime.
Orange County gave Team Kids its beginning. Philanthropy gave the idea room to grow, face scrutiny, and become stronger. Research from communities across the country now brings the learning home.
Philanthropy began with belief.
Team Kids chose to test it.
Twenty-five years later, the proof is living, leading, and serving.
