About
Built by people who've spent their lives watching what works.
A social-emotional learning program for children ages 5–12 — built for families and schools.
Young Mind Masters exists because the tools that transform adult lives shouldn't be reserved for adults — and because the people behind it have seen, up close, what happens when children are given a real language for what they feel
Our Mission
We give children a language for what they feel — before anyone has to learn it the hard way.
Our Vision
A generation fluent in their own minds — naming the storm before it ever names them.
Marijana
Founder, Young Mind Masters
Founder
Marijana C. Schwarte
Former global executive. Coach and the mind behind the method.
For nineteen years, Marijana led teams and navigated high-pressure environments in corporate executive roles across five continents. And she kept seeing the same thing: the patterns adults carried into work — the self-doubt, the over-control, the worry that never switched off — were almost always the ones they'd been quietly carrying since they were eight years old.
She trained as a PQ coach and a functional medicine health coach, and began working privately with executives, parents, and burned-out professionals on exactly those patterns. The question that started YMM was simple: what if children learned this now, before the patterns set?
Young Mind Masters is her answer — a curriculum that takes rigorous, wellevidenced frameworks (cognitive-behavioural science, positive psychology, and early-years practice) and translates them into something a child can hold in their hand and a teacher can hold in their lesson plan. That translation is the hard part. It's the work.
Marijana doesn't build YMM alone.
Taking a methodology from a working theory to something thousands of children can use safely requires depth in clinical practice, in early-years education, and in operational rigour. Our board has all three.
Board Member
Snežana Volić, MA
Gestalt Psychotherapist · Kindergarten Founder, Belgrade
Snežana has spent over two decades studying how the earliest years shape a child's emotional, social, and cognitive life. As founder of a Belgrade kindergarten (est. 2001), she has designed programs on early-years adaptation, emotional literacy, body-safety and safeguarding for young children, and the return-from-maternity transition for parents.
In her private practice she works with parenting, partnership, grief, trauma, and transgenerational patterns. Her perspective grounds YMM in what is developmentally appropriate at every age the program touches.
Board Member
Kevin Schwarte
MBA, Duke University · Strategy & Operations
Kevin brings the operational and strategic backbone behind the YMM mission. With an MBA from Duke University and a career building landmark commercial projects across the United States, he understands what it takes to turn an ambitious idea into something that actually gets built — on time, on budget, and at scale.
That same discipline is what enables YMM to grow responsibly: keeping the pedagogy uncompromised while the program reaches the schools and families that need it. Kevin oversees governance, growth strategy, and the standards that make a small program institutionally trustworthy
Three commitments that guide every decision.
1
Children are not problems to fix.
Every Grumpy in YMM has a sincere job. We never frame a child's pattern as broken, bad, or shameful. The whole method only works because of this — and we won't compromise on it.
2
Rigour over clevernes
YMM is original in its language and characters, but never in its science. Every layer of the program rests on established, well-evidenced frameworks. If something can't be grounded, it doesn't go in.
3
Trusted, not trendy.
We grow at the pace at which we can support every school and family well. We'd rather be the program a head teacher quietly recommends to another head teacher than the one going viral this month.
Now you know who's behind the work. Want to see it in action?
Start with one free lesson. No credit card. No commitment. Just 5 minutes with your child — and the first step toward a different kind of thinking.
