Today we’d like to introduce you to Candice Arancibia and the HTECV Feel Good Company.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Our encouraging words, listening ears, hugs, and high-fives make a big difference in the lives of the students we serve. The summer of 2020 magnified our society’s tremendous need for collective healing. As elementary school teachers, we knew that it was our time to love on our students because that is what we do. What we needed was love, sweet love— self-love, more specifically—and our hope was that this project would empower our students to do just that: radically love themselves.
Our year-long project of Self-Love started with a semester of exploring the many parts of student identities and learning to love every part of ourselves. In our second semester, we learned from feel-good experts about tools that we can use to take care of ourselves in hopes that we can share these tools and techniques with our community.
Students became familiar with tools and techniques that would empower us and make us feel good. We learned from art therapist, fitness coaches, gem experts, dancers, sound healers, tapping experts, and a love language expert. Through reflection on how these activities made us feel, our feel-good jar was born. Meanwhile, we took a deep dive into doing the things we love and doing more of the things that bring us joy!!! This was the creation of our passion project and more additions to our feel-good jars. In class, we were also doing mindful journaling, listening to good music, and noticing negative talk to replace it with positive affirmations. This was the beginning of our Feel-Good Boxes.
We got our big break when we partnered with Real World Scholars, who loved the self-love work that we were doing and offered us seed money to start a business. We gathered all that we learned during the semester and packaged it into our Feel-Good Boxes, Feel Good Jars, and affirmation cards. This was a great opportunity to be activists and teach our community to love and care for themselves. The first step toward social justice is self-love.
Our hope is that students and all those who we have touched, moved, and inspired will know and love themselves deeply and become so confident and comfortable with who they are. We learned that self-love is the best love!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Our business journey has been that of joy and struggle. During this time in 2020-2021, there were so many unknowns, especially in terms of educating our children. The seed was planted and began to bloom while we were all in distance learning. As a teaching team, we had to strategically think through how can we run a business with students online? How can we create a student-made product while not being in person? Who can we partner up with to support this work? How can we deliver products to customer while not being able to be in person?
As the business plans unfolded, we partnered up with Real World Scholars, and they gave us $500 in seed money to begin the business. We also partnered up with a relative of a student, Julian Sombrano, who was running an online spiritual center called Mostly Angels LA. Mr. Julian, who already had the infrastructure to package and deliver packages, kindly helped us tackle this part of the business.
We also had to think through how do we get materials for products into student hands. My own home became a pick up a drop off center for 3rd-grade families. Many of the materials like inserts for the feel-good jars, affirmation cards, and journal prompts were turned into digital formats and sent out to print. Other materials for the box curation, like incenses, candles, gemstones, journals, and chocolates, were purchased wholesale. Once all of our materials and products were gather. I drove it all to Mostly Angels LA to be packaged and delivered. This was a collective effort that was thought through with students, teachers, and community partners.
Then, after spring break, our business took another turn. We returned to school some days through a hybrid model. We has students in person! Students would now get an opportunity to get a feel what it feels like to run the day-to-day of a business in person. Students now got to package and curate boxes that would be available for local pick up. In addition to checking for new and completed ordered and running all the finances to ensure that we would meet our goal of raising money for the Monarch school in San Diego.
Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
The HTeCV Feel Good Company is student-led business run by the 3rd-grade students at High Tech Elementary Chula Vista they are supported teachers, families, and community members.
All products have been designed by students through intentional learning experiences curated by their 3rd-grade teachers. Students have selected from these learning experiences and their own best practices to create the feel-good box.
Students participated in cycles of feedback from community members to improve their product. Students have thoughtfully reflected about what it means to radically love yourself and what are their favorite tools to be able to provide the self-care and love that one needs for themselves every day.
The HTeCV Feel Good Company is most proud in the ways that they have learned to love themselves and the confidence that they exude every day through learning and themselves and these feel-good practices. This allows them to be an example of self-love and has given them the platform to teach the community of how to radically love themselves.
All proceeds from this business will be were donated to the Monarch School of San Diego. This decision was made by students who researched different non-profit organization who do similar work teaching self-love or organizations that support people who can benefit from HTeCV Feel Good Company feel-good tools.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out.
At HTeCv, we allow for the learning to happen along the way, and through reflection, critique, and revision, we have been able to make our product the best we can for our customers. We have learned from the words of Peter H. Reynolds in his book “Ish” that we can allow things in life to be “ish,” and that is perfect enough.
Contact Info:
- Email: carancibia@hightechhigh.org
- Instagram: @htecvfeelgoodcompany
