The outdoor space, which was connected to a nonprofit partner’s building in urban Kampala, was filled with light as youth began to trickle in. Greetings from the facilitators and Kampala University undergraduate mentors were met with shy smiles. It was as if these adolescents, who had faced more than a year of COVID-19-related school closures and lockdowns, had voices that were out of practice. The adolescents did not know one another, as they represented eight schools within the region, but they looked around with quiet curiosity. Students’ eyes lit up when they saw the banners, tables, and art supplies that had been carefully prepared in the “wellbeing center.” Although outdoors, the grass-filled courtyard of the building protected the youth from the busy outdoor streets. The facilitators of the Africa Education and Leadership Initiative (Africa ELI), executive director, Zaharah Namanda; Dr. Peninah Beinomugisha, a professor at Victoria University; and Norah Nalutaaya, a Ugandan teacher and Africa ELI board member, were easy to spot as they wore matching white polo shirts. They were leading ten full days of a positive youth development curriculum, the Wellbeing Club.

On the first day of the club, participants were introduced to a mindfulness activity. Jeremiah shared that he was nervous when he first heard about the practice of mindfulness and its relationship to breath as he suffered from asthma. With a lot of empathy, one of the Wellbeing Club facilitators moved nearer to him, and together they slowly followed the other facilitator’s voice as it guided students to focus on their breathing. Jeremiah followed the instructions carefully and by the end of the session, he was so excited by the positive results that he volunteered to lead the next mindfulness activity. Trevor, who was the youngest member of the club, could not hold in his joy while undertaking the mindfulness exercise. He said, “Mindfulness is so calming—it makes me relax and allows me to think over things that I give less attention to.”

In southern California, University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Professor Amy Bintliff texted doctoral student Rebecca Levine, “They’ve started their day!” This moment had been in the planning stages for months and then suddenly, within 1 week of Africa ELI receiving permission from government officials to implement the pilot during the COVID-19 restrictions in Uganda, the pilot began. Amy received photos and WhatsApp texts from Zaharah and shared them with eight undergraduate and graduate students who had spent 6 months supporting this pilot program through curriculum co-design, Zoom meetings, and working on the corresponding research design. Excitement grew among both teams as the collective contributions between Ugandan and US team members were finally “live” in action.

Introduction: Why Wellbeing? Ugandan Refugee Education

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, with special permission from the local government and in the middle of 1 year of school closures, Africa ELI, a non-governmental organization (NGO) (https://africaeli.org/) supporting refugee youth in Uganda, in partnership with the University of California, San Diego, (UCSD), hosted The for 25 Ugandan adolescents. The adolescents were selected to participate based on recommendations from local NGOs as students who could benefit from Wellbeing Club extra care and supportive programming. Africa ELI’s mission is to “provide access to education by preparing young people to become leaders in their families and communities, engage in business enterprise, counteract inequalities, improve health practices, and work toward improving society for the benefit of all citizens” (Africa Education & Leadership Initiative, n.d.). A growing number of youth beneficiaries of Africa ELI are refugees from the conflict-affected areas of South Sudan. In 2020, Uganda hosted over one million refugees mainly from South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burundi and the numbers continue to grow. Over 60% of refugees are under 18 years of age (UNHCR, 2020).

It is important to establish the context of aspects of the Ugandan education system that were the impetus for this project on wellbeing. In Uganda, although primary school enrollment has improved, 52% of children do not complete primary school (National Education Profile, 2018) and only 34% of females and 45% of males complete senior four (Grade 11) (Odaga, 2020). Youth living in the Katanga, Kamwyokya,Footnote 1 and Kawempe neighborhoods where this group of students live, face a variety of challenges that perpetuate school dropout including poverty, disease, civil conflict, post-traumatic stress, and violence. Refugee adolescents have reported a variety of challenges to their wellbeing, including issues of community safety, food insecurity, and, as caregiver needs increased, feelings that they were not loved by their new caregivers (Meyer et al., 2019). Additionally, in one study, over 31% of youth (N = 457) from this geographic area suffer from suicide ideation (Swahn et al., 2012).

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the issue of inequitable access to education in the Eastern region, with at least 49% of schoolchildren unable to access remote learning during school closures in 2020 (UNICEF, 2020). Whereas most students transitioned to studying remotely through TV, radio, newspapers, e-learning, and the internet, students without a household income to support internet access experienced a total stall in their formal learning due to the lack of digital aids and resources.

COVID-19 also magnified gender equity gaps in Uganda and led to increased mental health concerns, especially for girls (Us-Salam et al., 2023). With homes replacing schools, refugees, especially girls, faced increased protection risks including higher rates of gender-based violence and child marriage (UNHCR, 2020). COVID-19 triggered an increase in persistent stress, anxiety, and depression symptoms. Additionally, Ugandan youth, both refugees and nonrefugees, reported mood swings due to hunger, depressed feelings, and pressure to have early sexual intercourse (Meyer et al., 2019).

At present, there are few interventions or out-of-school activities to attend to the psychosocial and emotional needs of adolescent youth in Ugandan schools due to a lack of school counselors and large class sizes (Otwine et al., 2018). Thus, understanding what constitutes child and adolescent wellbeing in all contexts is of paramount importance in order for Ugandan children to reach their full potential. Out-of-school programming provides unique opportunities to teach adolescents the and strategies associated with positive holistic wellbeing, so that they can advocate for themselves and discuss their needs with their peers and caring adult facilitators. Much like UC Berkeley’s Y-PLAN supported professional and academic language development (Chap. 15), our partnership focused on teaching youth a language to discuss mental health and wellbeing while providing time for play, peer-to-peer relationship development, and art engagement.

Wellbeing is a multidimensional concept composed of varied definitions that generally focus on the quality of one’s life and their life satisfaction. The participatory model that we use in the Wellbeing Club stems from over 30 years of research with women and vulnerable children in seven different countries. Through workshops, both formal and informal, researchers Amy Vatne Bintliff, Lori DiPrete Brown, Nancy Kandall, and Sophia Friedson-Ridenour (University of Wisconsin-Madison) asked women and children to describe their own wellbeing based on their daily lived experiences. (See “Wellbeing Principles and Practices” here: https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/chapter19). Informed by the theoretical frameworks of Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1974; Bronfenbrenner & Ceci, 1994), that recognizes the impact of relationships, context, and community on an individual, Sen’s Capabilities Approach and Nussbaum’s descriptions of quality of life and justice (Nussbaum, 1995; Sen, 1993) which asks, “What is each person able to do and to be?,” an initial model was developed (Vatne Bintliff et al., 2019) and then revised to incorporate easy-to-understand language for children and adolescents as you can see in Fig. 19.1.

Fig. 19.1
A circular chart with eight concentric circles representing self, family, peers, relationships, informal community, formal community, environment, and global is divided into four aspects such as lifelong health, interconnection, thriving, and freedom and safety.

The 4W LIFT Model of Wellbeing (see 4w, n.d.). The participatory model used to facilitate discussion and activities about wellbeing

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The model differs from other wellbeing models because it incorporates aspects that were prioritized by women and children, including a fair and just society, environmental justice, and freedom from harm.

The Wellbeing Club-Uganda

The goal of the Wellbeing Club is to support adolescent wellbeing through a positive youth development curriculum that includes teaching the language of wellbeing through arts-based learning, peer-to-peer support, mindfulness strategies and community engagement projects. The Wellbeing Club-Uganda was born out of an international, cross-cultural research partnership which resulted from a connection between Amy Vatne Bintliff and Zaharah Namanda (co-authors of this chapter) at the 2020 University-Community Links (UC Links) Conference. (For more information about UC Links visit https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/). Amy and Zaharah both presented on issues of adolescent wellbeing and development. Post-conference, Zaharah and Amy remained in contact and began setting biweekly meetings to explore the potential of a collaborative partnership. The establishment of the Wellbeing Club-Uganda was grounded in cross-cultural pre-planning and co-design. From July to December 2020, Amy and doctoral student Rebecca Levine sent drafts of an 11-module curriculum entitled the Wellbeing Club to Zaharah who shared the curriculum with the Ugandan team. A series of six 90-min Zoom meetings provided space for exchanging cultural information, answering questions, and ultimately co-designing the curriculum to be used in a Ugandan context. Undergraduate and graduate students from UCSD were present in the Zoom meetings and heard Zaharah describe the challenges that the youth participating in Africa ELI face and the assets that they already have in place. Undergraduate students were able to ask questions which helped to shape their understanding of Africa ELI’s overall goals and the daily lives of Ugandan participants.

Simultaneously, Amy hired undergraduate and graduate students to co-author a 216-page curriculum based on Amy’s original dissertation curriculum which focused on wellbeing (Bintliff, 2019). Using small working groups and large team meetings, these student co-authors built upon the original curriculum by writing scripts for facilitators, mindfulness scripts, and vocabulary worksheets. Graduate students (Maxie Gluckman, Rebecca Levine, Patricia Hemans, Wendy Wei Cheung) shared their own expertise in international lesson design, trauma-informed care, mindfulness, and global gender equity. UCSD undergraduates, who themselves are adolescents under age 25, helped to share game ideas, wrote scripts, and contributed their expertise to the design of the club logo, banners, and t-shirts (Esmeralda Salas & Christian Demesa). UCSD students supported the Africa ELI/UCSD co-design of a corresponding research study and learned the process associated with obtaining approval for research involving human participants. Students also participated in our co-design meetings that followed community-based participatory research (CBPR) methods (Israel et al., 2012). Africa ELI and UCSD teams collaborated on every piece of the research design. One undergraduate student said, “I really learned how to develop a study based on the needs of a community partner. This project has completely shifted the way that I think of research and has helped me to see that the purpose of research can be tied directly to on-the-ground programming in communities.”

In this chapter, we briefly describe our practices and highlight undergraduate and graduate student involvement. Then we will provide examples of how 25 Ugandan adolescents benefited from learning the language of the wellbeing model and utilized strategies to support their holistic wellbeing both during the club and in their daily lives outside of the club.

Program Context

The day-to-day facilitation of the club was conducted by Africa ELI. Since Amy usually included mentors in the clubs in the US, and because UCSD undergraduate students could not be physically present in Uganda due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, Africa ELI hosted local undergraduate student mentors from Kampala University, a guest artist, and a mentor who herself was a refugee from South Sudan. These local mentors were guided by the Africa ELI team on the Wellbeing Club curriculum so that they could render support to the facilitators and youth. Every club activity required detailed attention; therefore, the mentors were instrumental in ensuring that resources were available and that each child had the necessary support to complete each activity. The passionate mentors were ready to form part of the Wellbeing Club with an expectation to learn, to support, and to be a part of the caring and transformative community.

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the club was established in two out-of-school phases totaling ten full-days of participation in 2021–2022, plus 6 month follow-up interviews (Phase One: February 11–September 13, 2021; Phase Two: September 6–14, 2021; 6 month Follow-up Interviews: May 2022). In the next section, we discuss the pedagogical approaches that we utilized in the design and implementation of this UC Links program.

Acquiring the Language of Wellbeing: Pedagogical Approaches

Facilitating the teaching of new wellbeing vocabulary was an instrumental part of the club. Promising research indicates that adolescent wellbeing can be improved when students are directly taught the language of eudaimonic wellbeing (Ruini & Ryff, 2016). Eudaimonic approaches move beyond hedonic notions of wellbeing that mainly measure one’s life satisfaction and happiness, and instead consider living life to one’s full potential and learning and growing through experiences, both positive and negative. Eudaimonic approaches can lead to overall health benefits, especially if one is engaged and feeling purposeful (Ryff, 2018). The Wellbeing Club model is rooted in this eudaimonic approach.

In order to teach students this new language, we divided the model into the quadrants of lifelong health, human connection, freedom and safety, and thriving. Adolescents wrote words that they associated with each quadrant, worked in small groups to discuss, and then wrote or sketched additional ideas in their journals. Because subjective wellbeing is measured using “self,” students created artwork that represented their identity, culture, the place they lived, and the time in which they were living. We then moved into discussing the spheres of influence that impacted their wellbeing and offered participants time to develop their own examples. Finally, we proceeded to define the 11 dimensions of wellbeing (the “petals” in the model). We used manipulatives, such as the petals drawn on paper that could be easily moved around, to consider each dimension. The process of modeling the language, taking notes, working in small groups with manipulatives, and providing space for adolescents to discuss the terms and concepts with examples from their own daily lived experiences was enriching for both participants and facilitators. Youth learned that they had similar visions for positive wellbeing and facilitators learned about the challenges the youth were facing. The process contextualized the language of the model and youth began using the dimensions of wellbeing in conversation with one another and with the facilitators.

Another pedagogy that supported students’ embodied understanding of wellbeing and their wellbeing language development was the use of the arts, including visual arts, theatre, music, and dance. The club also facilitated further development of pride in one’s identity through the painting of self-portraits. Self-portraiture can facilitate adolescents’ self-reflection around issues of identity (Parisian, 2015) and can be a tool to reduce adolescent anxiety (Becerra et al., 2022). To prepare for the painting of their self-portraits, students were introduced to acrylic paints and brushes and a Ugandan guest artist and mentor, Levi, helped them to co-create a self-portrait. The act of self-portraiture followed discussions about body image and identity stereotypes because youth were feeling more comfortable labeling and rejecting stereotypes and instead, had shifted to celebrating their own identities.

We invited an artist, Levi, to the club to teach step-by-step drawing because we knew that not all of our students had experiences with art education. Our students did not all have experience with painting, so initially some students were heard saying, “I have never drawn anything good, I don’t think I can do this,” but as Levi moved around, youth gained confidence, held their pencils and drew and painted. It was so thrilling seeing their portraits; they were excited and couldn’t believe they had done such tremendous work. “Is this my work?” Yvonne asked and she showed her portrait to her friend Tricia. “Of course it is and it’s beautiful,” Tricia answered in affirmative. Ester was thrilled too: “I must take this portrait and hang it in our living room, I need my father to also draw his self-portrait, I am going to guide him to draw.” The self-portrait project supported the development of language from the model, such as self-identity, engagement, mutual care, and “voice” and expression. See Fig. 19.2 for a group photo featuring students working on self-portraits.

Fig. 19.2
A photograph of students sitting in a row on a lawn painting themselves.

Self-portraiture. Students described painting their self-portraits as one of their favorite parts of the Wellbeing Club

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Please note that all caregivers and students consented for photographs to be taken and shared through the UCSD Institutional Review Board protocol.

Engaging Mind and Body through Mindfulness

Each morning, facilitators guided students through mindfulness activities that were written to correspond with the language of the participatory model. Mindfulness activities in the curriculum begin with exercises such as grounding, noticing of the breath, and body scans. These practices are common in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programs for adults (Kabat-Zinn, 1990). Patricia Hemans, a UCSD graduate student at the time and a yoga teacher, also wrote mindfulness practices that are deeply connected with the 4 W (Women and Wellbeing in Wisconsin and the World) LIFT (Lifelong Health, Interconnection, Freedom and Safety, and Thriving) model. For example, in Module 3, participants are introduced to the spheres of influences in their lives. The mindfulness exercise in Module 3 involves inviting participants to visualize people and places within their spheres of influence that are sources of support.

Black and Fernando (2014) argue that mindfulness practices can help children learn about the connection between the mind and body which enables them to feel calm, present, and connected to their current environment. Research on mindfulness in educational spaces, such as schools, has highlighted benefits such as improved grades (Bakosh et al., 2016), improved well-being (Huppert & Johnson, 2010), gains in executive function, such as behavioral regulation, metacognition, and global executive control (Flook et al., 2010), and decreased depressive symptoms and lower stress (Kuyken et al., 2018). In a recent literature review focused on adolescents, the majority of early adolescents in mindfulness research responded favorably to the practices and learned to use mindfulness as one of their coping strategies (McKeering & Hwang, 2019).

Mindfulness education programs are not without criticism, however. Critics argue that most mindfulness in education settings frame secularized discourse that are psychological, individualistic, and “effects-oriented” (Ergas & Hadar, 2019). Others argue that mindfulness exercises without the “communal expressions of the roots of suffering” in Buddhism positions the practice as self-focused rather than offering insights on Buddhist teachings of ethics or interdependence (Simpson, 2017).

Although our mindfulness programs are secularized since we work with adolescents from a variety of religious backgrounds, the mindfulness practices are part of a greater curriculum that promotes social justice. Forbes suggests that social goals of mindfulness should be embedded in education. He writes that practices should be embedded within “critical, integral programs that uncover and resist dominant ideologies and institutions in which we swim and consciously help us heal and create new relationships that work towards optimal personal development and universal social justice” (Forbes, 2016, p. 355). Although we encourage youth to practice on their own, holistically we position the Wellbeing Club’s mindfulness strategies as collective and collaborative because we begin by practicing together in relationship with one another intergenerationally as a practice of care as suggested by Roeser et al. (2023) and Weare (2023). We also work to embed mindfulness into our research practices to facilitate compassionate connection and to be open-minded when considering and discussing our individual and collective biases in our field work and our analyses (Orellana, 2020). Mindfulness is one component of the Wellbeing Club which is a curriculum inspired by social justice and equity that promotes student critical reflection on systemic injustices that impact their wellbeing, but also the wellbeing of their communities. As we describe in the next section, the curriculum is dependent on building positive compassionate relationships and youth-led community engagement.

Building Community: Talking Circles, Wellbeing Check-ins, and Community-Engaged Projects

Negative life experiences that participants face, such as poverty, a lack of access to education, or the isolation caused by a pandemic, can lead to increased risks of mental health disorders. However, having strong systems of support often mitigate such risks (WHO, 2004). One of the Wellbeing Club’s goals was to rebuild peer-to-peer relationships that had been impacted by the COVID-19 lockdown and to support strong positive family relationships.

Community was built in a number of ways including the sharing of family-style meals and utilizing talking circles to provide space for student voice. The Wellbeing Club participants resided in the slums of Kampala (Footnote 1) where families were hardly able to provide two meals a day during the COVID-19 lock down, thus the Wellbeing Club provided breakfast and lunch in a “family-style” format. Imagine students having widely spread smiles eating a tasty balanced meal while having a discussion with their peers and sharing about their personal experiences and how the club has transformed their lives amidst the pandemic.

Talking circles, or peacemaking circles, are a type of dialogue structure that involves turn-taking using a talking piece to create equitable opportunities to listen and share (Boyes-Watson & Pranis, 2020). A talking piece is often an object found in nature, such as a stick or smooth rock. We used a passion fruit as it was a recognizable fruit readily available in Uganda. The type of talking circle used in the curriculum is historically rooted in the practices of Indigenous community building (Running Wolf & Rickard, 2011). Bintliff was trained in Minnesota, USA, through a restorative justice school-based grant in 2002 (Reistenberg, 2012) and found it a helpful way to build feelings of connectedness with adolescents in the Wellbeing Club. When teaching students about talking circles, we inform them that it is a practice that values respect: when you have the talking piece it is your turn to share, when you do not have the talking piece it is your turn to listen (for more information on conducting talking circles see Boyes-Watson & Pranis, 2020; Pranis, 2005 or livingjusticepress.org).

At first, students were very shy to share their thoughts and ideas, but as the talking piece was passed around the circle, the adolescents became more confident. The facilitators always said, “There are no wrong or right answers,” which set a positive space for participants to speak up with confidence with no judgment. Culturally, in schools and in the community, adolescents in Uganda have very few opportunities to speak and be heard (Selvam, 2008). Self-expression through speech, therefore, was a new practice that the youth came to enjoy that broke their silence. This was evident in the way that youth attention and voice grew and progressed. They began deeply listening to one another and they said that the process helped them make new friends and built their confidence in public speaking and expressing themselves.

Another exercise that became very important was the wellbeing check-in process. In this exercise, youth were invited to look at a poster of the 4 W LIFT model and identify dimensions of wellbeing that have been a challenge for them and meet with other peers and mentors to discuss the challenges. They then were invited to identify dimensions of wellbeing that have been a strength for them and meet with other peers to discuss their strengths. This exercise enabled peers to feel less alone in their challenges and learn from their peers regarding their strengths. We trained facilitators in trauma-informed care practices prior to leading this activity as giving voice to challenges can be difficult the first time. Trauma-informed care includes recognizing that all participants may have experienced trauma, being patient and caring when youth are talking about traumatic experiences, believing youth, not probing for more details, as that can retrigger, and offering youth agency in what they share (for more trauma-informed care strategies see Jennings, 2019).

Another important pedagogical strategy in the Wellbeing Club was nurturing youth leadership through opportunities for them to engage in community wellbeing projects. Youth grew excited when presented with the invitation to choose community wellbeing projects they would lead. Each participant had a worksheet where they could complete the following sentence with a sketch or paragraph: I can support community wellbeing by ________. Participants had ideas ranging from visiting and cleaning homes for the elderly, orphans, and people living with disabilities, to cleaning streets and markets, planting trees, and advocating around youth issues, such as dropout prevention. Participants took time to deliberate on their ideas and a consensus on two projects was reached: (1) cleaning the nearby market and (2) teaching about COVID-19 prevention through posters left in the market, advocacy through writing, and performing skits to reach out to their fellow peers who did not have the opportunity to be part of the Wellbeing Club. One focus of the advocacy work was on teenage pregnancies and dropout prevention, a major challenge facing adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic. “We have to reach out to our peers, they are faced with diverse challenges, we wish it wasn’t a lockdown and we were allowed to meet them as a group, we would have shared with them much of what we have learnt. We hope this short play will be meaningful and will change someone’s life,” described Tricia and Yvonne as they composed their short play which they uploaded onto the Africa ELI YouTube channel. (You can access the Africa ELI YouTube channel here: https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/chapter19).

Key Ideas

When students explored a language of wellbeing through the arts, mindfulness, talking circles, and community projects, they grew in confidence, began advocating for their own wellbeing, developed resilience skills, and became leaders within their homes and communities. Most importantly, participants adopted a shared language to verbalize the strengths and challenges they faced and recognized that they were not alone. The impacts of this important process for building resilience are described below.

The Language from the Model Improved Students’ Family Relationships and Leadership Development

Caregivers noticed that students were expressing themselves using language from the model. One student said that knowing the language helped her communicate with her father and that “He now knows me.” Caregivers reported that students who had participated in the Wellbeing Club were acting more caring towards their siblings and that they were doing household chores without complaint. Some reported that students were taking on more leadership roles within the family. Caregivers expressed an interest in learning the wellbeing model too. To address this need, we are planning to build workshops for caregivers into Ugandan programming in the future.

Mindfulness Helped Regulate Emotions, Explore Purpose, and Connect Families

Mindfulness became an enduring habit for many adolescents and it helped them handle daily stressors and regulate emotions. Adam spoke about using mindfulness as a tool to regulate emotions once he returned to school post-COVID. He said, “In this program of wellbeing we learned this value. We learned how to control our souls, and our emotions, so when a teacher tells me something emotional I just calm down, take a deep breath and let everything go on.” The practice also brought student in-the-moment feelings of joy. Jordan was happy and loved the mindfulness activity more than any other activities, saying, “Mindfulness has made me think and decide what I need to be in the future. I want to be a lawyer and now I confirm it.” Flavia gathered her family members to share the mindfulness exercise before going to bed one night. Her caregivers and siblings loved the exercise and agreed to practice every night before bed time. When we gathered for the second phase of the Wellbeing Club after 7 months, Flavia said, “We love the mindfulness activity, it has helped my mother, she had breathing problems. We normally share how our day was as we do mindfulness, it has brought our family together, and it’s the last thing we do before we go to bed after our prayers.”

Talking Circles and Wellbeing Check-ins Built Connections

Talking circles and wellbeing check-in activities were powerful aspects of the curriculum because they all focused on interconnection, relationship building, and feeling compassion for one another. Faith described her relationships with peers and her ability to feel connected, “I felt so attached to them-how they were talking. And I was like, ‘Are they the same as me?’” One of the boys learned of sexual harassment and discrimination that the girls experienced on a daily basis and emotionally shared his feelings of compassion in his interview, sharing, “The talking circles were influential. The Wellbeing Club was my first time to get deep because we are taught about voice and expression. I learned about things happening to my sisters in the club and how they are treated in the community, which is not okay. Now girls look at you like you are their brother and you are someone who can help. And you need to help.”

Community Projects Inspired Involvement

Through the community project, both mentors and participants began defining challenges their community faced and looking for a way to become involved in creating solutions. This became a powerful activity for the UCSD university mentors as they too were learning the language of the model and were completing 40 hours of volunteer field work, tutoring, and mentoring youth in local schools. UCSD students participated in the same wellbeing check-in process in Amy’s classes as the Wellbeing Club-Uganda participants, which enabled the UCSD students to improve their own awareness of their holistic wellbeing. One UCSD undergraduate wrote, “By just naming my challenges and talking through them with peers helped me feel that I am not alone.” Undergraduate students at UCSD became inspired when they saw the work youth have done in Uganda which has propelled them to become better mentors to the local youth they were supporting. UCSD undergraduates wrote letters of support and encouragement to the Wellbeing Club-Uganda youth. Both youth and mentors became committed to sharing their knowledge about wellbeing with others. One Ugandan youth participant reported that the model helped her to counsel other peers when they were involved in conflict. She had the language to de-escalate them before they began to fight. In the same way, a UCSD student shared that the model helped them work through roommate conflicts peacefully and with compassion.

Discussion

Results indicate that the 4 W LIFT participatory model of wellbeing, and the Wellbeing Club curriculum, were successful tools to promote wellbeing among 25 adolescent participants living in low-income areas of Kampala, Uganda. The model provided a common language which enabled youth to describe their challenges and strengths. Through this community-based international partnership, we have been able to contextualize curriculum to meet local needs while simultaneously exposing US undergraduate and graduate students to Ugandan culture and the participatory model of wellbeing.

When analyzing the components that facilitated the adoption of this language of wellbeing, it is important to consider the integration of community, mentors, facilitators, adolescents, and their family members. Although this program differs from others in the volume due to being an out-of-school program running on school breaks, it is similar to other programs in regard to the connections that continue to grow between all of the stakeholders. Our circle of contact with one another has become a complex web involving undergraduates at both Victoria University and UCSD, adolescents and their families, club facilitators who wrote reports and were interviewed for research, and the larger international team which is collectively analyzing data and gathering for UC Links events to share findings with the wider network. These multifaceted relationships that have been nourished over a 3-year period enable our team to flourish.

As the program continues to grow and seed new sites in Uganda, including a school-based partnership, we recognize that the essential components mirror those in the wider UC Links community: engaging youth in discussions about language in a variety of contexts, prioritizing youth voice and adapting to their needs; exploring concepts of resilience through mindfulness, art, and leadership activities; providing undergraduate and graduate students with opportunities to assist with research and programming; and exchanging ideas within an active global network.