Long before she was developing frameworks or teaching others about the brain, Donna Volpitta, Ed.D., was interested in a fundamental question: how do people learn to think, make decisions, and respond to challenges?
This interest in how people think grew from her own experience as a student. Growing up with two working parents, Donna developed a strong sense of self-reliance from a young age, and she quickly learned to navigate challenges and think for herself. At GFA, she found a close-knit community and formed friendships that lasted well beyond graduation. She also developed meaningful relationships with teachers like Angela Van Acker and Headmaster Jim Coyle, who encouraged students to think for themselves and engage with the world around them.
That foundation—learning how to think, not just what to think—remained with her. Years later, as a teacher, Donna began to notice a shift in her own classroom: year by year, students seemed less equipped to manage setbacks. This raised deeper questions about how children develop resilience in everyday life. As a mother of four, she was seeing those same challenges play out at home. “I became really interested in resilience as a parent,” she says. “Not just how we respond when things go wrong, but how we help prepare kids to handle challenges in the first place.”
Looking for answers, she turned to psychology and neuroscience, drawing on her studies at Middlebury, Boston University, and Columbia University’s Teachers College to better understand what was happening and how to address it. In 2014, she published The Resilience Formula: A Guide to Proactive Not Reactive Parenting, offering practical advice for parents to help foster resilience in their children through intentional daily experiences.
At the center of Donna’s work is a belief that understanding how the brain works should be part of everyone’s education. “People aren’t taught how their brains work, but it’s one of the most important things we can understand,” she says. From this idea, she developed the Resilient Mindset Model, a proactive framework to help students, educators, and families better understand how their thinking shapes behavior, making brain science practical and usable in everyday life.
In 2019, Donna met her business partner, Jason Schofield, which she identifies as a game-changing moment. Together, they launched Pathways to Empower, an organization dedicated to translating brain science into practical tools. In 2020, they created their first course, an online college course, which was offered for extra credit in a class at SUNY Oswego. The course saw a 98% completion rate and a 98% student approval rating, with students consistently asking the same question, “Why didn’t anyone teach us this before?” What began as a small effort quickly expanded into a broader body of work, courses, workshops, and resources designed to help educators and families apply these ideas in real-world settings.
In partnership with the publisher Kendall Hunt, Donna and Jason developed educational content that teaches applied neuroscience and the foundations of mental health literacy, spanning kindergarten through college. The content includes teacher training, video-based lessons, and age-appropriate materials designed to make neuroscience both accessible and actionable.
Additionally, in 2023, they partnered with Annie Slease to launch The Mental Health Literacy Collaborative, which helps educators understand how to meet the growing mandates to teach mental health education. Their one-hour Mental Health Literacy Aware program increases teacher confidence about teaching mental health literacy from 49% to 98%.
More recently, Donna and Jason have turned their attention to younger audiences. In the fall of 2025, they launched Danni Dragonfly, a YouTube channel focused on teaching preschool children, educators, and caregivers about brain health and resilience through songs, animated videos, and puppets.
Across all of Donna’s work, certain core ideas remain consistent. One is that resilience cannot be taught without challenge. “Kids need to struggle to build confidence,” she says. “When we remove every obstacle, we take away their opportunity to learn how to handle challenges and develop that confidence.” She also feels strongly about the effects of over-monitoring, arguing that tools like location tracking can unintentionally send the message that the world is unsafe and that children are not capable of navigating it on their own. “The adolescent brain is wired for making mistakes and becoming independent,” she says. “If we take that away, we deprive them of the chance to grow.” As social media, marketing, and artificial intelligence continue to shape daily life, Donna believes human, not technical, skills will matter most in the years ahead. She also emphasizes the importance of understanding how these systems interact with the brain, often pointing to her favorite quote from Edward O. Wilson: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
If Donna could offer one takeaway for today’s students, it would be not to avoid challenges. “Challenge is good,” she says. “Face it early and often.” It’s a mindset that has shaped her own path as much as her work—one that sees challenge not as something to avoid, but as an essential part of building a life of purpose.