”I have had the privilege and delight of attending Happy Seeds workshops for the past two years. Yuen is a dynamic and passionate advocate for wellbeing. During Happy Seeds workshops, I have learned how to inspire my students to have a growth mindset and become more resilient in the face of adversity.
I am also applying these concepts in my own life. Happy Seeds workshops share information that is significantly beneficial to all education and mental health practitioners, especially those who work with children and young people.”
- William Burnside
“It is important not only for teachers but for every single person who works in the field of education to understand their emotions and how to be friends with them.
I was able to learn many new strategies on how to help young learners deal with their emotions.
Amazing emotions workshop! Highly recommended. Thank you Yuen.”
Testimonial
I have known Ms Yuen Pang, Co-Founder of Guangzhou Happy Seeds since 2017 in the capacity of a professional service provider for positive psychology and wellbeing. As an educational leader in Australian private and government schools, I have had decades of experience working with children who have social-emotional learning challenges. This might range from children with short-term attention deficit to those significantly on the autism spectrum. I have worked closely with organisations such as Autism Australia and Beyond Blue. I am aware of the research on children’s social-emotional needs and found it refreshing that a broadly based positive psychology and wellness organisation existed in Guangzhou.
Within the ISA International Education Group, we have engaged the services of Yuen, her Co-Founder, Amber Li and other Happy Seeds professionals to assist our children, parents, teachers and leaders. Yuen and her colleagues have provided informative and engaging workshops in English and Chinese at our annual Professional Learning Conferences since 2019, including topics such as attention enhancement, enacting the PERMA Principle of Martin Seligman, forming and maintaining positive relationships, building resilience, developing a balanced emotional state, dealing with negative emotions, and stress management.
At the 2024 ISA Professional Learning Conference, Happy Seeds provided a highly interactive workshop with ISA parents on positive and healthy parenting practices. Each year, the Happy Seeds workshops are among the most highly rated according to the evaluation data, and their attendance is always at maximum capacity.
Yuen and colleagues have also conducted ongoing workshops with students from ISA Liwan during their co-curriculum time and focused on character building, developing emotional strengths, forming positive relationships with peers and family, and building resilience. Again, evaluation data indicated that students rated the workshops very highly. Happy Seeds staff collaborated with the ISA Science City Support Services Team to provide workshops for staff and for students. Again the focus was on emotional wellbeing, and building character and resilience. Staff recognised the interwoven nature of emotional wellbeing and academic achievement.
ISA leaders and specialist support staff have also recommended Happy Seeds as an organisation to assist families with personalised and ongoing counselling support, usually at one of the Happy Seeds Centres. Issues include attention deficit, social withdrawal, reluctance to learn, social awkwardness, difficulty of forming relationships, antisocial behaviour, high levels of anxiety, and post-traumatic stress. They provide specialist services that most schools are usually not equipped to deal with.
From our dealings with Happy Seeds during the past 8 years, we feel that their services fill a very necessary void in the educational and wellbeing sphere, especially in China where there is a high degree of reluctance for diagnosis and formal support. Their empathetic, evidence-based, and interactive approaches have helped countless children and families in both small, and life-changing ways. They have helped parents take a more adaptive approach to child rearing, and focus on strategies and techniques that ease student anxiety but without sacrificing the time-honoured goals of school learning and academic achievement.
We have found Yuen to be a very knowledgeable and collaborative professional, easy to communicate and work with, and eager to help children, teachers and parents become more emotionally astute, resilient, socially balanced, and future-focused people.
Gary Butner BA Dip-Ed Med MACE
Director of the Academic Centre
ISA International Education Group
Guangzhou and Wuhan, China