Kaiya's Founding Story

Kaiya, inc. is a public benefit corporation democratizing access to mental health for teens, by teens.

Founded by Maddy Bourgeois, the company name Kaiya has many powerful meanings including "ocean" in Hawaiian and "forgiveness" in Japanese. But even more importantly, Kaiya's founding name was inspired by a true story of two tremendously brave teens named Kaiya that Maddy met in 2021. In middle school, both teens worked through profound mental health challenges that later led them to provide hope, support, and inspiration to younger peers in their communities.

With access to treatment and support, both teens worked through this challenging life experience and used their stories to uplift, educate, and support younger peers going through something similar. When Maddy met these two teens with this shared story, she thought to herself, “how might we create a world with more teens like Kaiya?” With that, the vision for teen peer support was born.

But first, we needed a way to train these peer leaders. So we started by recruiting exceptional Kaiya Fellows from across the U.S to co-create the foundation of the Kaiya Peer training curriculum & community. From there, we piloted this digital Peer training alongside a Middle School in Detroit, where 10 teens bravely stood up in front of 120 classmates to teach CBT & DBT-informed skills during homeroom.

Fast forward, Kaiya has integrated the teen-shaped curriculum with California’s Formal Peer Support Specialist Curriculum to create a world-class training process to scale this service.

Kaiya now provides personalized digital support groups & 1:1 sessions to teens aged 13+ through video chat.

These online sessions are led by an esteemed team of older peers (18+) trained by Kaiya’s clinical team with the 17 core competencies of the California Professional Peer Support Guidelines.