Fostering Resilience for Children in Adversity: A Guide to Whole Child School-Community Approaches

The Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child’s guidebook Fostering Resilience for Children in Adversity: A Guide to Whole Child School-Community Approaches presents evidence for adopting a school-community approach to fostering resilience for children living in poverty and other forms of adversity. Designed for practitioners and educators, the guide shares robust, global examples of interventions implemented at the home, school, and community levels that take a holistic approach to their programming and concludes with key considerations for research and learning agendas. Fostering Resilience for Children in Adversity offers guidance on what resilience is and how practitioners can foster and measure resilience in low-resource and/or poverty contexts. By incorporating research on resilience risk and protective factors at all stages of early childhood and adolescent development, the guide will ultimately help to inform practitioners’ and educators’ design and measurement of whole child development programming.

Education and resilience have a strong reciprocal relationship: participation in education promotes children’s resilience, and resilient children are more likely to participate in, and to benefit from, education. Using school-based programs as a point of entry, Fostering Resilience for Children in Adversity describes how to improve children’s resilience by cultivating positive, nurturing relationships, meeting children’s basic needs, and developing their core capabilities and values across three of a child’s primary socio-ecological domains: the home, school, and community.

The guidebook is intended to support educational actors in their design and implementation of programs to foster resilience in children growing-up in adversity. Non-education actors may also find the guide useful to encourage collaboration with school-based actors.

For more information on the Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child, please visit their website. A copy of the above guidebook in French, Promouvoir la Résilience des Enfants dans l’Adversité: Un guide des approches pour le développement intégral de l’enfant à l’école et dans la communauté, can be accessed here and a copy of the above guidebook in Spanish, Fomentando la Resiliencia de los Niños en la Adversidad: Guía de Enfoques escolares y comunitarios integrales para el niño, can be accessed here.