Young people know their challenges best and are motivated to address them with their unique perspectives on localization, relevance, and diversity. Unfortunately, many humanitarian and development efforts overlook their input, failing to genuinely involve them without tokenism or manipulation. This denies young people their right to contribute to decisions affecting them and misses opportunities to create sustainable solutions for the mental health and well-being of youth worldwide.
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Children and adolescents exposed to violence and conflict need nurturing and healing learning environments to recover, learn, and reach their full potential. Together with local partners, regional authorities, and international actors, we integrate MHPSS into education and livelihood skills programs in humanitarian settings in innovative ways. The knowledge generated from these projects is then applied to advocacy work promoting the integration of MHPSS elements into education programming. Our projects have included partnerships with Education Cannot Wait, the World Bank, and Porticus in Uganda, South Sudan, Mali, and across borders.
Climate and ecological crisis
The climate crisis poses an unprecedented threat to our planet. It impacts ecosystems, weather patterns and the security and way of life of communities worldwide.
Beyond the environmental implications of the climate crisis, it has far-reaching impacts on mental health and psychosocial wellbeing of individuals and families, including mental disorders, emotional resilience and social cohesion. Disasters such as hurricanes, wildfires and floods cause displacement and economic loss, but also a range of challenges to mental health and psychosocial wellbeing such as loss, stress, anxiety, trauma, and grief.
In an everchanging world, we scan the horizon and build strategic partnerships, innovative approaches and anticipatory action planning, to address emerging and critical challenges to child, youth and family mental health and wellbeing in fragile and humanitarian settings
Areas of work
We build connections, knowledge and new ways to improve the mental health and wellbeing of children, youth and families in adversity.