We’re back with another Why We Bike spotlight, a series highlighting organizational partners and riders of Bike to the Beach who work to help others reach their fullest potential. In this article. Meet Stina Borth, who has channeled her passion for helping children and young adults having difficulty maximizing their executive functioning and emotional intelligence capabilities into Keymaker Youth Support Services. Keymaker provides individualized direct educational programs, workshops and education consulting to give her young charges the keys to unlocking their fullest potential.
For ten years now, Stina has been helping to shed light onto the behind the scenes going-ons in children’s minds. In her words, “Awareness is the first step in making any significant behavioral changes and it is far from the last”. It takes time, effort, and dedication to adjust the neural pathways in one’s brain, regardless of how aware they might be that whatever behavior they’re engaged in is a “problem behavior”.
Born and raised in Minnesota, Stina fondly remembered her childhood spent hanging out with her dad, biking along the nature trails that spiderwebbed the landscape around them. After starting her college career off at Southwest Minnesota State, where Stina’s love for helping and welcoming others pushed her to start an International Students Mentorship Club, she transferred over to U-Minnesota in the Twin Cities. Post-graduate life found Stina sticking close to the Twin Cities, attending Augsburg University where she focused her masters in specialized education. It was while attending Augsburg that the social and emotional factors that are integral in one’s ability to succeed truly became evident to Stina, beginning what would become a life-long drive to help others succeed.
Much of these factors were tied in with social emotional health and the way that we as a society nurture and help children who are struggling with their mental health in school. In fact, Stina’s masters Leadership Action Project/Thesis was entitled “The Perspective of Professionals on Best Practice for Providing Instruction to Youth on the Topic of the Maintenance of Mental Health and Self-Regulation”. Her research was focused on best practices for mental health maintenance, and how we go about addressing them in educational settings, public or otherwise.
For Stina, who spent her immediate post-masters years in Arizona working with primarily middle school – high school aged children, the cracks in the system soon became clear. Time after time she saw kids essentially begging for help through their actions but being ignored until the situations and responses reached crisis level.
Eventually, Stina decided that she wanted to do more to help those kids in need than what she was able to do through her current job, and thus Keymaker was born! Officially founded in 2019 in Tucson, the first year of Keymaker’s existence was a tenuous one. Since then, Stina moved the operations (and herself) to Miami, establishing Keymaker as an S-corporation and focusing the organization into an online platform to allow the continued support of clients in Tucson as well as the new clients spread out across Florida, California, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Currently, Keymaker helps students across the United States. Although the original focus of Keymaker was on K-12 students, over the past few years as clients have progressed to college, they have been expanding their base to include college-aged and young adults.
Even with the added responsibilities put on her plate as Keymaker grows, Stina continues to conduct all the onboarding and initial consultations and provide the support and treatment for the first month of a client’s journey. As she has built up Keymaker’s reputation, Stina has found other medical providers wanting to join her in helping these teenagers and young adults create the keys to their future. For the most part, Stina remains heavily involved with providing support and education for each client, in some instances bringing on another member of her team to co-provide services when it is called for. With the success of Keymakers first few years, there has been an increased interest on the working side, allowing Stina to create a network of employees and other professionals that help maintain the support of clients, and allow Stina to oversee client programs as well as consult and collaborate with schools, organizations, and parents on opening doors for youth.
Stina will be at the Bike to the Beach Florida event this May 6th, with the goal of completing the 25 mile ride. If you’re interested in learning more about Keymaker, or becoming a client, check out their website here! Huge thanks to Stina for all the work Keymaker is doing (as well as carving out time to speak) in helping her clients shape their keys to unlocking the future they not only want, but deserve!
