Connecting research to the frontlines

From the beginning, Lenny has been about one thing: the right resource, at the right time.

Bryce and I started this work because we both watched people we love struggle with mental health. And because we learned, across hundreds of schools, that the educators closest to kids face the same gap every day. A counselor with a student in crisis. A teacher noticing something off but not knowing what to do next. The question was never whether good resources exist. It's whether they reach the right person, at the right moment, in a form they can actually use.

As that work has grown, now across more than 1,000 schools, we've gotten clearer on where we can have the most leverage in making that real.

The bottleneck isn't tools. It's the evidence underneath them.

Billions of dollars go into research on learning, neurodevelopment, and adolescent wellbeing every year. Thousands of papers are published every week. But almost none of that reaches the people who need it most. If you're a teacher working with a neurodivergent student, or a counselor trying to find the right intervention for a kid struggling with anxiety, you're more likely to find whatever has the best SEO than whatever has the best evidence. The platforms and programs schools rely on are often built on a single framework, not customized, and not keeping up with the research.

Very few organizations are doing the labor of curating, vetting, and staying current on what the evidence actually says, and making it accessible. It's a problem we've had to work through ourselves.

On one side, there's the work of building tools and getting them into schools. On the other, there's the work of making sure what's inside those tools is actually grounded in the best available evidence. There are already amazing organizations doing the first part, everything from lesson planning platforms to AI-enabled therapy. But very little infrastructure exists for the second: deeply analyzing the constantly evolving research, vetting it, and making it usable for the people building and delivering these programs. Without it, even the best tools are only as effective as whatever framework they chose to build on.

So we're doubling down on closing that gap.

Here's what we're building: an open evidence library for student wellness and education. Curated research. Vetted content. All accessible through an open-source platform and API that organizations and builders can plug into.

We're using frontier AI models to power this work, and we're grateful to have Google.org as a key supporter. The idea is simple: instead of every platform and program doing its own research in isolation, the Foundation serves as a shared evidence layer underneath all of them.

Our library already powers Lenny's school platform, serving instructional materials and student services across over 1,000 schools in the U.S. As we invest further in the library and open up the API, other organizations will be able to plug in directly. That adoption opens a new path for the Foundation to generate earned revenue to sustain this open-source work.

To make this focus possible, the commercial platform and school partnerships are moving into a separate entity. The Foundation is being fairly compensated for these assets through an independently overseen process and retains its own resources to continue its mission.

We're also giving the Foundation a new name: Openbrook. Lenny got us here, and we're proud of everything that name represents. But as the open evidence library becomes our core work, we wanted a name that reflects what we're building: something open, shared, and meant to be built on.

For those of you who have supported Lenny's mission from the beginning: your impact now does something rare. It doesn't fund a single program or a single intervention. It strengthens the evidence infrastructure underneath all of them.

Every platform, every practitioner, every builder that plugs into this work carries your investment forward, into classrooms and conversations that reach further than any one of them could alone.

Imagine it's 2030. A new study comes out of Johns Hopkins showing that a specific early intervention approach cuts chronic absenteeism in half for middle schoolers. Within days, not years, that finding is vetted, synthesized, and available through an open API (Lenny Foundation). A district in Texas updates its counselor training materials. A nonprofit in Chicago builds it into their after-school program. A mental health app used by thousands of families builds it into their recommended strategies overnight.

The evidence just moved, like water through a system that was already built to carry it.

That's the world we're building toward. The infrastructure underneath that makes all programs and platforms better. Open, constantly learning, and available to anyone working with kids.

We live in a remarkable moment. The technology to make this possible finally exists.

But technology doesn't build anything on its own. People do. People who believe the world their kids grow up in can be better than the one they inherited. We're deeply grateful to count you among them.

You can learn more about the Foundation and its work on our site. We welcome your questions, your ideas, and your support.

Onward,

Ting & Bryce