Resilience Building among War Affected Children

Strengths for the Journey (SFJ) is a positive psychology intervention designed to improve mental wellbeing and resilience in children living in refugee camps. A trial evaluation of SFJ, conducted in 2017 in 3 Greek refugee camps, found that it leads to improvements in wellbeing, self-esteem, optimism, a sense of connectedness and depressive symptoms in children participating in the intervention compared to age-matched control refugee children (Foka et. al., 2020).

Since 2017, the SFJ intervention has been integrated into the learning curriculum of formal and informal schools and has been delivered to over 1000 refugee children living in the Greek refugee camps. To enhance the impact of the current programme, we have scaled up the SFJ intervention in a different context and including local as well as refugee children and adolescents. Since the start of 2023, we have delivered the SFJ intervention in Lebanon to over 500 children (7-16 years of age) including local Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian refugee children. A total of 280 of these children have participated in a randomised controlled trial research to evaluate the effectiveness of the SFJ intervention in these populations. 

See an interview with Dr Sevasti Foka about her fantastic research which is helping to build resilience in refugee children: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/ow3-research/featured-research/strengths-for-the-journey-intervention-gives-hope-to-children-in-refugee-camps/

In the Strengths for the Journey programme children make colourful drawings and learn about positive emotions.