The Building with Bamboo Team

Meet The Resilience Champions

At the heart of the Building with Bamboo team are the Resilience Champions. Martha, Alfred and Krishna are leading learning projects on the ground in their organisations.

Building Resilience for Sustainable Futures

Homes and communities of street-working children in peripheral neighbourhoods around Guayaquil, Ecuador

JUCONI Ecuador have been working with families affected by violence, including sexual violence, in Guayaquil for over 20 years. As an organisation with established strengths and resilience-based approach, JUCONI’s learning pilot did not involve introducing new concepts, but rather drew on the Bamboo 1 research by piloting new methods. A new programme of peer support between older children and young people who had ‘graduated’ through the JUCONI program and children who were currently being supported drew on findings from Bamboo 1 which highlighted the importance of informal actors in helping children cope with adversity. In addition, JUCONI will be piloting formal resilience scales to explore how these might help promote resilience, and what we can learn from such tools when developing service responses.

Martha Espinoza

Martha is the Executive Director of JUCONI Ecuador and has worked for the organisation for over 17 years. As an experienced child psychologist and practitioner, Martha brings technical knowledge to the project. She is working with Merli Lopez. Coordinator of their Working Child and Family Programme, to deliver the project in Ecuador.

JUCONI Ecuador

Read Martha's articles:

Supporting the parents of street-connected children

Understanding Street-Connected Children and their Family Background

Reinforcing Resilience Programme

Jinja District, Uganda, with some home follow-up work being done across other nearby districts

Having worked with street-living and street-working children in Jinja, Uganda since 2008, SALVE International support children on the street as well as offer family reintegration support. SALVE’s pilot was co-designed by children themselves. Through a program of activities including dance, music, drama and sport, SALVE built relationships between children and their wider community, building on the Bamboo 1 findings highlighting the importance of non-formal actors (community contacts) and promoting children as actors in their lives, not passive victims. Alongside the child-led activity programme, SALVE used the Bamboo 1 findings to develop new tools and approaches and build staff capacity.

Alfred Ochaya

Before becoming Resilience Champion full time, Alfred was the Street Outreach and Drop-In Centre Manager at SALVE. He is a qualified social worker, and volunteers in his spare time for the Red Cross doing a variety of health training, including sexual health, for young people in the community. Alfred is a Street Invest global trainer with many years experience in hands-on street work and leading teams.

S.A.L.V.E. International

Read Alfred's articles:

Helping Street-Connected Children to Connect with Loving Relatives

The Relevance of Secure Attachments

Promoting Resilience of Child Domestic Workers in Kathmandu

In and around Kathmandu Valley, Nepal

CWISH work with child domestic workers in Kathmandu, offering rescue and rehabilitation, counselling and family reintegration support. They also offer drop-in services for child domestic workers and support for them to attend school. Over the course of this project, CWISH explored ways to incorporate learning from Bamboo 1 – for which CWISH was a research site – into their ‘Exit Strategy’ approach to removing CDWs from harm, and trialling resilience based approaches in their drop-in and supported learning interventions. They also worked with formal and informal stakeholders such as the police, authorities and local community members such as market traders. An important finding from the Bamboo 1 research at CWISH was that religious and spiritual festivals are important in helping children to feel included and supported. For this reason CWISH incorporated cultural events and festivals in to their pilot.

Krishna P. Subedi

Krishna is CWISH’s team leader, the coordinator of the senior management team. He has experience in research and practice, and expertise in child protection, particularly in relation to child labour and child sexual abuse. He has worked in child rights and child protection in Nepal for 15 years, for national and international organisations, including UNICEF.

CWISH Nepal

Read Krishna's articles:

The Role of Society in Developing Resilience in Children

Building with Bamboo Support Team

Beth is responsible for generating income for all aspects of Consortium for Street Children’s work. She has nine years experience in the charity sector and specialises in fundraising for child rights-based organisations and NGOs. Prior to joining CSC Beth worked at Save the Children where she led fundraising appeals to respond to humanitarian emergencies. Beth has a background in Trusts and Major Donor fundraising and working with partners to transform the lives of children both internationally and in the UK.

Ruth is a Social Development Consultant at Keep Your Shoes Dirty. She has fifteen years experience in ethnographic and participatory research and collaborative, evidenced based approaches to programme design, monitoring, evaluation and learning. Ruth has worked in wide-ranging contexts across Africa and Asia as well as the UK and has particular expertise in bringing forward the perspectives of hard to reach and vulnerable groups including research with sexually exploited children and street-connected children. Ruth has also developed participatory training manuals and research and evaluation toolkits for frontline staff, as well as youth-led and peer-to-peer research projects.