In 2002 Brookline Center Clinical Director Henry White, who served as consulting psychiatrist to the Brookline schools, began working with Brookline school leaders to plan and pilot the Brookline Resilient Youth Team, the original bryt intervention, at Brookline High beginning in 2003-04. In 2006, neighboring Wellesley initiated Wellesley High Bridge. Between school years 2008-9 and 2012-13, fourteen additional high schools launched their own versions of bryt.
As replication continued, the Brookline Center began to develop infrastructure and activities to support schools in implementing the bryt intervention. The first bryt Symposium was held in 2010, and led to the establishment of a monthly job-alike meeting for bryt clinical coordinators. In 2011, Katherine Houle became bryt’s first network-level staff member. At that time bryt and Brookline Center leaders began thinking explicitly about equity and access to BRYT for students and families from diverse communities, racial and ethnic backgrounds, and income levels.
Between 2013 and 2015 bryt gathered the data for its first multi-school descriptive evaluation study and worked with a consulting team to develop a five-year strategic plan focused on continuous expansion in Massachusetts along with development of infrastructure, tools and processes, and sustainable funding for the growing “BRYT Central” team. The expansion of what is now known as the bryt National Team from 2016 onwards led to dramatic increases in number of schools implementing the bryt intervention, for example more than tripling (from 40 to 137) between spring 2016 and fall 2019.
In 2019 the Brookline Center worked with a consulting partner to initiate bryt’s next multi-year strategic plan, which reaffirms our commitment to bringing bryt to scale in Massachusetts while beginning to grow bryt in other states. This has led to implementation of the model in more than 60 schools outside of Massachusetts, with concentrations in Oregon and New York’s Hudson Valley region.