In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, we are supporting conversations among civil society and philanthropy practitioners from around the world to discuss how we are feeling, the challenges we are facing, what we are learning and together imagine the world we want to build back when this blows over. Here we will be sharing what we are learning from our conversations.
Resilient is a word frequently used by human rights activists and the development sector, to describe persons affected by war and violence. In Sri Lanka, the mothers of the disappeared are praised for their resilience when they continue their struggle for justice despite intimidation and harassment. Women headed households labouring to eke out a living…
Resilience has been the word on everyone’s lips over the last year. We’ve probably all felt our resilience tested or reaffirmed in different ways. For those of us who have been directly responding to the impacts of the pandemic on people and planet, resilience has been a helpful concept to frame the individual and collective…
Sometime during a recent PEXForum conference, I wrote on my notepad that resilience has become the development sector’s new buzzword. Others have made the same discovery. PSJP’s new paper, Building Resilience in International Development lists a raft of references to the term in the later literature of development and it seems that multilateral organisations, foundations,…
What builds community resilience? In this article posted on the India Development Review, Ruchita Chandrashekar, a behavioural health researcher and independent psychologist focusing on trauma and post-violence recovery offers important lessons for development and philanthropic organizations in their attempt to support communities through difficult times. As elements that are integral to building community resilience, she…
Since March 2020, Indonesia has recorded 127,000 cases of Covid-19 at the time of writing, the 24th highest figure in the world. While the pandemic has brought crises and apprehension, it has also brought some blessings in disguise. For one thing, it has stimulated a rise in giving during the first few months of pandemic,…
Sex workers are a hypervisible population — in popular imagination, in media, in sketches of the ‘bad woman’, but strangely they are also completely invisible — in government policies, the healthcare sector, etc. This hypervisibility/invisibility means that sex workers are viewed through the lens of criminality, morality or victimhood while finding themselves on the periphery…
The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated lockdowns in the main cities of the country meant that millions of Brazilians had to quickly adapt to a new reality. Social isolation is the main tool for minimizing the effects of Covid-19 and reducing the spread of the virus. However, this isolation has enormous consequences:…
On 18 March, the Brazilian government mandated the closure of public schools, non-profit organizations and other public entities that provide essential services to the most vulnerable families in the region of Greater Florianópolis. Vulnerable children, in particular, relied on the food that was given to them at school, or by local non-profits. At the same…
Over the last few months, likely each and every one of us has felt pushed to the limits of our abilities to cope with the current global situation. Even for those of us for whom lockdown is no more than an inconvenience, this moment has undoubtedly led to more self-reflection, and an appreciation of the…
Coronavirus has changed our world forever. Plans made a few weeks ago seem outdated at best or undoable at worst. The speed of this has been remarkable. In a recent article, former UK prime minister Gordon Brown quotes Lenin: ‘There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.’ Those of us…