Gratitude, Out Loud: Grateful Peoples on the Kelly Clarkson Show
This week, Grateful Peoples founder Teddy Droseros joined the Kelly Clarkson Show to talk about something deceptively simple: what happens when a classroom full of kids spends two quiet minutes a day writing down what they’re grateful for. It’s a small habit with an outsized reach — and at a moment when youth mental health is one of the hardest problems schools face, that combination is exactly why the story traveled all the way to daytime television.
For anyone discovering Grateful Peoples for the first time through the show, here’s the fuller version of what it’s all about.
The idea that started on a coffee-shop table
Grateful Peoples didn’t begin as a nonprofit or a product. It began when Teddy Droseros left a single journal on a neighborhood coffee-shop table with one line on the cover — “Today, I am grateful for…” — to see what strangers would write. They filled it. Then they filled another. Those handwritten entries eventually became a book, and the book began funding journals for classrooms.
That instinct — that gratitude is most powerful when it’s shared, and that it can be taught — is the whole foundation of the organization. Today Grateful Peoples is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has donated 24,000 gratitude journals to classrooms through its Gratitude in the Classroom program.
Why this is a youth mental health story
The reason a gratitude journal belongs in a conversation about youth mental health is the scale of the need. According to the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, roughly 2 in 5 high-school students report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and many schools simply don’t have the staff to meet that demand. The tools that help most in that gap are the ones that are cheap, simple, and able to reach a lot of kids at once.
Daily gratitude practice fits that profile almost exactly. It costs a journal and a pen. It runs in two minutes, led by a teacher who’s already in the room. And the early results from Grateful Peoples classrooms are real: behavioral citations fell 40% at Lincoln Middle School and 60% at Cassia High School over a year, and 100% of Grateful Peoples teachers report significant improvements in student mindset and behavior after incorporating daily gratitude into the curriculum.
On the show, Teddy Droseros described what a daily gratitude practice can do for a young person:
“There’s a lot of really cool science out there about how it improves your mindset, fosters real empathy, and most importantly builds mental resilience, which are the most crucial skills we need to be teaching our kids for them to live a happy and fulfilling life with the way the world is going.”
That’s the case Grateful Peoples brought to daytime television: a daily, no-cost habit that helps kids build real skills — simple and scalable enough for any classroom to sustain.
How to be part of it
The show puts a spotlight on the work; the work itself is funded by people who decide to help. Grateful Peoples donates classroom sets of gratitude journals to schools that ask — and demand from classrooms already outpaces what current funding can cover.
Send journals to a classroom. A donation puts gratitude journals directly into students’ hands — and you can often choose the school.
Partner with the program. Companies and foundations focused on youth mental health can get involved here and help reach more schools.
Start your own practice. Every Grateful Peoples Gratitude Journal sold helps send another to a student.
Whether it found you through a television screen or a classroom, the invitation is the same one printed on that very first journal: today, what are you grateful for? Write it down. It’s a smaller thing than it looks — and, for a lot of kids, a bigger one.
One journal, two lives. Each Grateful Peoples Gratitude Journal helps send a second to a student — and a single donation puts gratitude journals into a classroom that asked.