It all started when a seven-year-old girl named Katie was bullied by the kids at school for being a Star Wars fans. “Star Wars is for boys,” she was told. Katie’s mother – Carrie Goldman – wrote a blog post about the incident that was viewed by 82,000 people in in a matter of days. Star Trek actress Chase Masterson was one of them, and posted a response that read, “I love science fiction, and I know lots of girls and women who do. Katie, you be you!” It wasn’t long afterwards that Goldman and Masterson began sending each other emails, and then formally met at the first Geek Girl Con in Seattle in 2011.
As a result of that meeting, the two launched the Pop Culture Anti-Bullying Coalition in 2013. After Chase Masterson met Matt Langdon, founder of the Hero Roundtable and Hero Construction Company, the following year, the name of the organization was changed to the Pop Culture Hero Coalition. By emphasizing the positive “hero” over the negative “bullying,” Masterson and Carrie Goldman hoped to convey a more pro-social message. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry likewise served as an inspiration for the new organization, especially his cornerstone of Vulcan philosophy known as IDIC – “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.”
“It was very exciting for me to be able to bring this full circle,” Chase Masterson told Trek Movie in December 2021. “As an actress, I have seen how deeply this show impacts people – and it has been so powerful to then work with psychologists and educators to make these stories part of school curriculums, and to really get to the root of why bullying happens, how to deal with the bullies, how to help them get psychological assistance so that they don’t feel the need to be cruel. We soon realized that identity, and fear, and lack of self-compassion, lack of self-worth, and lack of resilience were so intrinsically tied with bullying that we should create a full mental health curriculum rather than just do bullying prevention.”
The Pop Culture Hero Coalition helps improve the social and emotional skills in children through examples in pop culture that they can relate to, not just Star Trek but a wide variety of narratives and mediums as well. Their website highlights uplifting quotes from many pop culture icons, from Batman (“Why do we fail? So we can learn to pick ourselves back up. You are someone. You mean something.”) to Wonder Woman (“You are stronger than you believe. You have greater powers than you know.”) to the Black Panther (“You get to decide what kind of king you are going to be.”) Positive messages abound within pop culture, and the Pop Culture Hero Coalition is committed to bringing those messages into the real world.
One of organization’s biggest supporters is Chris Coker, CEO of the YMCAs of Northern Colorado. “The Y has always believed in equity and diversity,” he said during a panel at the 2022 Star Trek: Mission convention in Chicago. “My day camps all have seven thousand kids and I need social, emotional learning. I need diversity. The Heroic Journey of the Pop Culture Hero Program very much focuses on that. What it uses is a program called a proxy relationship. All of you are going to talk to a child who has suffered something and they don’t have the words many times to talk about it. But they can talk all day long about Harry Potter’s loss of his parents. Or when they talk about identity, they use superheroes. Supergirl can talk about hiding her secret identity. Well, I think you guys can see where that goes from there, you’re hiding your secret identity. And we all have that, but some of us have it harder than others and some of us have families that are not supportive of that. And so how do you tease that out of a child? You can do it using pop culture.”
It has been proven that the best way to teach children is by using something that is already part of their lives. The pop culture that children enjoy can thus be utilized to not only entertain kids but engage them socially and allow them to make emotional connections to the characters.
“When they get together, they all share social anxieties, social insecurities,” Carrie Goldman explained at Star Trek: Mission. “They all want to fit in, and they all have a lot of fronting and masking behaviors that they use for coping skills to hide how scared they are. And they don’t want to talk about that to each other because it’s terrifying. So going back to what Chris said about the proxy, what I do with the curriculum is we find characters from a whole range of different situations and we say, ‘Hey, let’s look at how this character in this story feels insecure or scared or socially anxious, and it gives kids a safe metaphor to talk about their own feelings.”
By improving the mental health of children, the Pop Culture Hero Coalition believes it can end bullying, racism, misogyny, LGBTQIA+ bullying, and cyberbullying. “People who are mentally healthy support and hold and cherish and promote each other’s human rights,” Chase Masterson said in Chicago. “That’s what Gene Roddenberry set out to do, that’s why we are taking what he did in the sixties and moving it forward in real life.”
“It starts with the fandom,” Carrie Goldman added. “It starts with seeing someone and you’re a Star Trek fan and I’m a Star Trek fan. But then it happens when you start talking about why you love Star Trek Discovery. There is so much diversity in Star Trek Discovery. And then the deeper connections are made, and that’s what we want kids to be able to do, is have those deeper connections. Not necessarily about the things that they’re happy to put out in the world but the things they want to hide because then we can also help them to find healthier coping skills. So instead of dealing with that insecurity by cutting, or an eating disorder, or by getting high every day, they can say they found someone to talk to and connect with and choose healthy coping skills to deal with the stress their feeling about these things.”
The YMCA has taken the lead in rolling out the Pop Culture Hero Coalition’s Heroic Journey across the country, but schools and organizations everywhere can use it as well. “The YMCA is testing this in 160 communities right now,” Chris Coker said at Star Trek: Mission. “Not two, not three, 160 different communities. It’s going to be something big and it’s going to be something real, and I ask you to get involved. Because the only way that change happens is when people are involved in their own little way, in their own town, in their own community. It doesn’t matter if it’s the school district or the YMCA. Who cares? The point is that the children need the program.”
“We are literally teaching IDIC – teaching kids to stand up for themselves and for each other,” Chase Masterson told Trek Movie. “This work is what Gene Roddenberry started.” Thanks to Pop Culture Hero Coalition, that work continues, not only onscreen but in the real world as well.
Anthony Letizia