Local Teen Creates Health Showcase

Tessa Zimmerman will be having a health showcase on March 9th from 3-7pm at the Center for Energy in downtown Westport. With this health showcase, Tessa hopes to show teens a new perspective on health and help them gain more coping mechanisms for stress, anxiety, and peer pressure. Tessa’s mission is to empower to teens to realize and enable their potential.

Since 2010, Ms. Zimmerman, 17, has been trying to get teenagers to tap into their own potential and use it to improve their community both locally and globally. This began with her blog, TeenSanity, which has been visited by over 22,000 people from 10 different countries, since it’s launch. Seeing the interest helped her to realize it was time to expand her reach. She is now a regular contributor to internet-based,  ‘FTNS’ Radio, where she has her segment ‘Tessa Tries It Out’ on the Youth Movement Show. She has also launched her educational model, ASSET. Through Awareness, Self-Efficacy, Science of Happiness, Exploration, and Touch Connection, ASSET empowers teens to realize and enable their potential. Teenagers often turn to drugs, alcohol, and partying out of not having the tools to harness their excess energy or as a way to deal with the pressure of being a 21st century teen. This is where ASSET comes into play. ASSET provides teenagers with the tools to not only survive the teenage years, but to also thrive during these years and beyond. With ASSET, teens learn life skills, but also learn how powerful their youthful brains are and how capable they are of making a difference. Both our local communities and world need the creative teenage brains to better the world, but first teenagers need to realize their own potential. Partnered with the non-profit organization, The National Student Initiative, Tessa brings ASSET to local schools.  

“I wanted to provide teenagers with a chance to experience health in a new light, that’s why I created this showcase. “ The showcase will open with a healthy food tasting provided by local health bloggers, restaurants, and a few of Tessa’s own recipes. Then attendees will be given a chance to experience the ASSET model itself through fifteen- minute station rotations of Mindfulness, Wellness Counseling, Exercise, and Original Play. Tessa will give a keynote speech on her work and the event will close with candlelit Kundalini Yoga.

Ms. Zimmerman’s crusade to help teens and see that they can start making valuable contributions also stems from her own fight to be heard and seen. Tessa grew up struggling with significant anxiety in school, so she sought tools to help her to cope and empower herself. She found nutrition, fitness, Mindfulness, and ‘Original Play’ to be the best tools to not only conquer anxiety, but life itself. Thus ASSET was born. If you want to learn more about Tessa’s story, you can visit www.iamasset.org.

Here’s what others are saying about Tessa’s work:

"A teenager performing at their peak levels is an incredibly powerful force for positive change, Tessa is exactly the young woman who can help teens get to such a place" Christopher Quirk, High School Director at Easton Country Day School

“Tessa really opened up my eyes to a new way to do things. I think her methods really help with school anxiety and taking the world head on.” Emma, 15

“I definitely liked how Tessa talked about student empowerment. The exercises we did during the presentation were really fun and I’m glad we got to do them instead of just hearing about them. They’re something that I will be doing when I need to calm down or focus.” Nathaniel, 12

To attend Tessa’s health showcase, go to http://assetshowcase.eventbrite.com/ or http://iamasset.org