About Us
HumanKind Institute is a national nonprofit organization, rooted in Connecticut, dedicated to building belonging in schools, colleges, and communities through structured play.
At a time when young people are more digitally connected yet increasingly isolated in real life, HumanKind addresses a critical need: belonging does not happen by accident. Instead, it must be intentionally designed and sustained.
HumanKind advances belonging as an operational system, and one that schools can implement, measure, and embed into everyday student experiences.
Leadership Team
HumanKind Institute was built by practitioners; people who have spent their careers in the rooms where culture is actually made. Below are the people who lead this work.
Chris Curtin
Founder
About Chris
Chris Curtin is the Founder of HumanKind Institute, Inc., a venture dedicated to building belonging and eliminating bullying in schools through structured play, trained Ambassadors, and measurable culture change.
Chris brings more than 20 years of experience in human resources, leadership development, and organizational culture to this mission, most of it spent inside some of America’s most complex organizations. His corporate career includes leadership and executive roles at Pratt & Whitney and Raytheon Technologies Corporation (RTX), where he led HR for a $10B global business with more than 40,000 employees. In that role, he built the enterprise talent infrastructure — including talent management, learning and development, diversity and inclusion, and large-scale change management initiatives — from the ground up.
That career gave Chris a front-row seat to a persistent truth: the hardest problems organizations face are not strategic or financial. They are human. Belonging, connection, and psychological safety aren’t soft skills, they are the foundation on which everything else is built. And they can be built intentionally.
Chris is also the Founder of Connected Approach Partners and Leadership Center CT, a 20-acre leadership development campus in Farmington, Connecticut. His work there — designing and delivering leadership programs, executive coaching, and culture enhancement experiences for clients including NWN, RTX, Repligen, and Big Y — informs every dimension of the HumanKind model.
As a speaker and facilitator, Chris has presented to professional audiences at Boehringer Ingelheim, CVS, RTX, RELX, the Talent Development Think Tank Conference, the New England Association for Talent Development (ATD), and the International Coaching Federation (ICF) Connecticut Charter organization.
Chris believes what the research confirms and what every school counselor already knows: when young people feel like they belong, everything changes.
Credentials
ACC
SPHR
JD – UConn
NY Bar
CAP
Robb Armstrong
Executive Director
About Robb
Robb Armstrong is the Executive Director of HumanKind Institute, Inc., where he leads program design, Ambassador training, and the day-to-day delivery of the HumanKind experience in schools across the country.
Robb is one of the most experienced practitioners of school-based social and emotional learning and experiential belonging work in New England, and his path to that distinction is as human as the work itself.
For a decade, Robb served as Program Director and Master Trainer for Dylan’s Wings of Change (DWC), a nonprofit foundation born out of the Sandy Hook tragedy and dedicated to fostering empathy, courage, and connection in young people. There, Robb led the Wingman Movement, an experiential, student-led belonging and anti-bullying program that grew under his leadership to reach more than 60 organizations, trained 1,200+ student leaders, and embedded more than 60 Wingman Trainers inside school districts and on DWC staff.
Before DWC, Robb spent 16 years as the Outdoor Adventure Director at Winding Trails, Inc., a nonprofit organization in Farmington, Connecticut. In that role, he directed high and low challenge course programs, led character development initiatives, and trained staff to create experiences that stretched young people beyond their comfort zones and into genuine growth.
Together, those experiences – i.e., more than 24 years of structured play, facilitation, experiential learning, and youth program design – make Robb one of the rare practitioners who can make a gymnasium feel like sacred space. He knows how to hold a circle. He knows how to draw out the lesson beneath the laughter. And he knows, from thousands of hours of experience, that belonging is not accidental. It is designed.
At HumanKind Institute, Robb leads the training of every Ambassador cohort, ensures fidelity to the HumanKind Method, and serves as the primary architect of the program experiences that make schools feel
different, not just on day one, but a year later.