Leading Your Organizations, Companies, and Communities

My action pledge has been to use tech to provide social-emotional support and skill training to vulnerable children and youth, especially those who experience trauma.

The corona virus has not only precipitated anxiety specifically related to the virus itself, but triggers anxious feelings and memories from the past that may otherwise have been resolved or at least suppressed.  Part of the key to alleviating those myriad forms of anxiety is providing context-specific motivational counseling and the most relevant set of evidence-based skill training for the symptom as the child experiences it.  That may be about nightmares, or bedwetting for younger children, maybe related to cutting or substance abuse for older children.

To date, our program is being used with high need students in about 4000 schools, but suddenly every child in the country can be considered high need, and many, many will not have even the support of school for help dealing with it.   So, in support of the national and global efforts to limit the harmful effects of the virus, next week we will begin making our program available to children in their homes, without additional charge to our school customers.

Initially, it will rely on wifi, as it does in their school, but we have engineered a self-standing app that is waiting in the queue at Apple and Google, to be approved for distribution.  It can be downloaded once, and kids will have access on their phones when, where and how they want. We aren't charging for this. We can extend to existing school clients at minimal cost to us, but to make it universally available across the country, we would need to find sponsorship. We're also in the middle of testing the breathing plush service dog, that I developed as part of my action plan.  

So, although we cannot attend the Action Forum this year, know that I am carrying the spirit and my pledge forward to help in this crisis.

And if Dan knows anyone higher up in Apple, could he see if they can expedite approval of our program?  It's a newer, phone version of the one that already was listed on the national registry of evidence-based programs by NIH/SAMHA as a comprehensive children's mental health intervention,

With warm regards,
Alice Ray, Pahara Fellow, 5th class

We had to shut down the Drama School and most students have travelled to their home towns. 
The faculty and staff have adapted rapidly to WFH tools. 
The big challenge is now e-learning for a drama school - antithetical entitites needing to work out - somehow. We're going to be trying a number of classes from next week and iterating with each class. 
The calm bit is knowing that the only constant in all this, is change, has really freed us to think about anything and everything as possible. 
We're now not even making a plan, but rather lookng at the unknown - the duration of school closure in two week intervals, and for each two weeks of added closure - we adapt. 
All we've done is written down what min standards are that we need to educate these kids, and found some focal points around which to build a whole new curriculum structure that will deliver, regardless of when we come out of this. 
The planning , will rewrite it self as we go along. 

Now we have to look at the next bit, which is our viability as an orgnaisation at the 3 month disurption mark, the 6 and 9 month. 
That's scary. 
Watch this space. 

 

Brit+Co is offering free classes for the next two weeks. You can check them out at brit.co/learn.

Hi, John.  Hope you are holding up well.

Our district here in Panama depends largely on tourism and walking traffic. The money dried up immediately, especially for those who live on the informal economy parking cars, selling souvenir, driving taxis, etc. We don't see that coming back very quickly and because Panama is a dollarized economy the government will not have the same tools at its disposal as countries that can use monetary policy to stimulate spending.

So to give people a medium of exchange that encourages barter of goods and services we have created our own local currency called "Buenas Obras" (Good Deeds) money. It started as a printed bill that tenants in our apartment buildings could earn helping out and doing odd jobs to pay their rent. It is now electronic and we are seeing people and businesses get creative in how what they offer to buy and sell through it. Restaurants are accepting it in partial payment of some meals (daily leftover specials), my company accepts it as partial payment of rent, and  there is a small foodbank "store" open where donated food can be "bought" for Buenas Obras.

I think that it will also become a way for NGOs to more efficiently distribute aid and at the same time encourage behaviours in line with their missions. We've talked with organizations that are currently sending food directly to their beneficiaries about instead depositing the food in the local food bank store and sending their beneficiaries Buenas Obras electronically. We will see how that pans out and what other creative things people come up with. 

It's not a full solution to the lack of money circulating in our neighborhood economy, but it's keeping people creative and thinking about what they can produce and exchange rather than solely on what they don't have and need. There are some interesting resources below on these kinds of community/complementary currency systems if anyone else thinks it would be helpful in their communities. The electronic system is called Cyclos 4, which is free (subject to some limits) and was pretty easy to set up. 

https://medium.com/weareco/6-examples-of-complementary-currencies-that-will-change-your-vision-of-money-4ba659814d31

https://medium.com/mbc-dauphine/local-currency-a-way-to-rebuild-trust-between-agents-aa4019eda8e0



https://cooperativecity.org/2017/11/26/complementary-currencies/