In collaboration with children's charities in India, our project addresses the critical issues of child rescue, rehabilitation, and education. These charitable organisations specialise in providing residential care and reintegration services for children who have faced various challenges, such as dropping out of school, experiencing child labor, sexual abuse, child marriage, and substance abuse. Our primary mission is to rescue and reintegrate these vulnerable children into the educational system and society.
One significant challenge we identified during our research is that many of these rescued children lacked fundamental aspects of emotional well-being, particularly low levels of self-awareness and self-compassion, commonly referred to as self-love. This deficiency in self-love was not limited to the children we worked with but was also observed among children supported by other charitable organisations, including those dealing with childhood cancer. We believe that this issue extends far beyond the borders of India and is likely prevalent in many of the world's poorest countries, characterised by high rates of child labor and destitution.
In response to this pressing need, our project focuses on developing a universally accessible toolkit that transcends language and cultural barriers. This toolkit aims to empower charitable organizations and educational institutions worldwide to collaboratively design daily rituals centred around nurturing self-love in children. We firmly believe that spirituality plays a pivotal role in this process, as it has been shown to be highly effective in combating depression and fostering resilience, especially in children facing adversity.
By emphasising self-love as a core element in awakening spirituality among children, we seek to equip them with the emotional and spiritual tools necessary to thrive in challenging circumstances. Our project aspires to create a positive impact not only on the children's immediate well-being but also on their long-term prospects for a brighter and more resilient future. Through our efforts, we hope to pave the way for a more compassionate and spiritually enriched generation of children worldwide.
Having come from the third sector, I was keen to return to charities when this project came to me. My aim was to explore how we could foster love amongst the most vulnerable members in our communities. In the process of doing so, discover the barriers to cultivating love and co-design solutions that allow us to tangibly enable love across those boundaries. These boundaries include but are not limited by economic, cultural, language, ability-related, social, geographical, etc.
In light of rising rates of mental health conditions in the US and beyond, Fetzer’s work has uncovered that spirituality may be the key to building more resilient minds. On digging further I realised that promoting self-love was a great way to increase spirituality and increase resilience for those who faced challenging situations.
Our Self-Love toolkit, built using service-design methods, empowers institutions with a series of co-design sessions to engage adults and children in designing activities aimed at increasing their self-awareness and compassion in key moments that impact children’s self-esteem.
1) Many parents struggle to plan for the future due to limited knowledge and find themselves primarily preoccupied with immediate needs rather than considering long-term benefits. Consequently, they face challenges in providing consistent educational support for their children at home.
2) The current classroom reward system tends to spotlight the talents of a select few, inadvertently fostering competitiveness among students.
3) Children often resort to disengaging from education and distancing themselves from those around them as a coping mechanism when they experience sadness and feelings of inadequacy. Unfortunately, this coping strategy has adverse effects on their educational progress.
I used behavioural archetypes of children to create scenario based activities that enabled the children to ideate on rituals of self-love that would work for differing needs. For instance: Children in the workshop were put into teams and asked to design an activity to help 'Ram' (a secret dreamer) who had witnessed a difficult situation at home, and out acted out in class as he was unable to realise his emotions. He fled after being punished for his behaviour. The team that worked on Ram's situation designed a chit game that would enable 'Ram' and other kids to share about their lives and make friends with him.
We believe in making life-long love connections through great design.
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