ORGANIZATION
Let Grow
The nonprofit Skenazy co-founded in 2017 with Jonathan Haidt and Peter Gray to translate the free-range framework into operational interventions — school programs, legal reforms, community norms — restoring specific experiences of unsupervised play and autonomy to specific children.
Let Grow is the institutional vehicle through which Skenazy's critique of overprotective parenting became operational policy. Founded in 2017, the organization works at three levels: school-based programs (Let Grow Projects and Play Clubs), legal reform (Reasonable Childhood Independence laws in multiple states), and research partnerships documenting the outcomes of restored autonomy. Its relevance to the AI age is structural: Let Grow provides the proof-of-concept that developmental frameworks can be institutionalized against the grain of worst-first thinking, and its methodology — evidence-based, pilot-tested, iteratively refined — offers a template for school-based AI policy that escapes the prohibition-or-permissiveness binary.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The organization's signature intervention is the Let Grow Project: teachers assign students to do one thing on their own — walk to a store, cook a meal, ride a bike alone — that they have never done before, with parental permission. The assignment is small by design. Its purpose is not to produce measurable
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