Emerging Perspectives on Scaling Whole Child Development in Adversity
For more than a decade the TruePoint Center has been working internationally with a remarkable set of innovators on their journey to scale up programs supporting whole child development for young children facing adversity. Whole child development entails fostering a caregiving environment that helps children reach their full potential across the entire range of developmental domains, in a balanced, holistic way. Adversity too has many dimensions, and children often face many different specific sources of adversity. Our innovator partners work in low resource settings, e.g., in low- and middle-income countries and refugee camps, to respond directly to these sources of adversity.
Enabling whole child development in general, and protecting such development from threats arising from such adversity in particular, requires a nurturing environment with active, supportive relationships between children and their caregivers. To foster such environments, programs generally find they must in turn work to build high-quality relationships with the families they serve. As they succeed at this in their pilots, these programs then face the challenge of scaling up their relationship-intensive work in settings where resources are stressed. Here, we summarize an emerging point of view on ways to approach this challenge, gleaned from our experiences and observations working with innovators who are at the leading edge.
The Foundation:
Human Dignity, Respect and Agency
Focus on building human dignity, respect and agency of the people the program aims to serve, and of everyone involved in delivering, supporting or enabling the work.
In our work with innovators in whole child development, we have been impressed by the way they honor the dignity and individuality of everyone they serve. Their work brings to life Amartya Sen’s concept of development as freedom, with a focus on human capability. They see people living in settings of adversity, even extreme adversity, as fully possessed of human dignity and potential, and their work involves supporting that potential and removing barriers to its realization.
It may seem that work in this spirit, which depends on high-quality, personal relationships with every individual and family, would be difficult to scale up across systems serving thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of people. It may seem necessary to accept compromises on the path to large numbers. We have observed that scaling relationship-based programs is indeed challenging, but that within this challenge is also an opportunity: Respectful relationships are contagious. Honoring the dignity of front-line service providers, for example, provides a context for them to in turn honor the families they serve. When innovators ground their scaling strategy in an uncompromising focus on the dignity and agency of everyone involved, they can actually energize systems which have limited resources for service delivery; they can engage individuals, families and service providers in a journey that effectively solves delivery challenges and realizes untapped potential. In short, scaling can align with, rather than cut against, work that honors each individual.
Our journey with innovators on scaling their programs is fundamentally about pathways and strategies to enable this kind of transformation. We have seen innovators achieve a great deal as they enact such strategies; the ‘core themes’ we offer below represent our efforts to synthesize salient aspects of these strategies. While we have seen the promise of these approaches, they are each evolving works in progress, and part of a large ongoing exploration. We aim to offer observations from the journey, not a picture of the any destination.
The emerging perspectives offered here take as their foundation respect for the dignity and agency of all participants. To further explore the five themes built on that foundation, click HERE and join the learning journey with us.
Related Resources and Tools
Amartya Sen provides an overview in Development as Freedom
See also Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach by Martha Nussbaum
An inspiring program that brings relevant ideas to life for whole child development in Indigenous communities: CanalCanoa: Strengthening indigenous values to improve early childhood development by Kurt Shaw and Rita de Cácia Oenning da Silva
An example of conceptual work applying the capabilities approach to child development: The Missing Dimensions of Children’s Well-being and Well-becoming in Education Systems: Capabilities and Philosophy for Children by Mario Biggeri and Marina Santi
A basic resource is the Convention on the Rights of the Child from the United Nations and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child from the Organization of African Unity (African Union)
For an example of a human rights case focusing on human dignity see Manuel Wackenheim v France from the United Nations
