weRISE: youth-led Mental Health Transformation Through Cultivating Gratitude, Kindness, and Hope

The adolescent years for young people is a period of crucial life transitions and isfraught with a range of internal and external challenges. Young people in low‐ andmiddle‐income countries (LMICs) are particularly vulnerable to mental ill health giventhe exposure to multiple adverse life experiences. Positive psychological interventionshave been brought into the social‐emotional learning curriculum of western countries andhas shown efficacy in supporting the salutary effects of the same in the health andwellbeing of the young people. In most LMICs, where there is less access to psychologistsand psychiatrists, the models that are used have only a limited amount of application tothe young people who are struggling.The primary goal of this project is to design and test the effects on mental health andwell‐being outcomes of an arts‐based train‐the‐trainer intervention, cultivatinggratitude, kindness, and hope among youth in schools and informal settlements. Thecentral change theory is that by cultivating these key strengths, youth will experienceempowering mind‐set shifts that will prepare them to navigate past, present, and futurelife challenges, including mental illness.In order to create a robustly tested, adaptable, and scalable intervention that speaksdirectly to the realities of young people in schools and informal settlements in LMICs,this project will integrate the research currently available in the fields of characterdevelopment, positive psychology, and mental health. This project will supportcross‐border collaboration in a number of ways to successfully bridge these rich anddiverse sectors. It will bring together specialists from LMICs and high‐income countries(HICs), mental health and character development professionals, as well as youth and adultresearchers, to produce the fundamental evidence at the nexus of character developmentand health outcomes.This project will use a single‐blind cluster randomized controlled trial design with 10clusters 60 young people within schools and 30 in communities recruited from informalsettlements in Nairobi and India. The evaluation will employ a mixed methods approach todetermine the impact of the intervention on mental wellbeing of young people.Quantitative data will be collected through a survey at baseline and end‐line while focusgroup discussions (FGD) will only be conducted at end‐line. These will be analyzed usingSTATA and NVivo softwares respectively.This project proposes that, the model and evidence generated will be innovative in anumber of ways: 1) it is designed to scale in low‐resource settings and takesreplicability into account from the start. 2) the intervention's accessibility to adiverse range of youth in LMICs, including the most marginalized, is considered from thestart; 3) it departs from the traditional approach of testing interventions based onindividual character strengths in order to weave gratitude, kindness, and hope togetherthrough an integrated life course (past, present, and future) approach and; 4) the focusis on young people's leadership and their ability to support themselves and their peers.Character strengthening is associated with independent critical thinking inherentlyrequired in developing leaders. While this is not an outcome of the study the ability tolead oneself and others with compassion signifies likelihood of a longer‐term impact ofthe character strengthening intervention. Findings from the study would contributetowards improving mental health policies and programs.