Making Generation R – encouraging resilience in the next generation

A campaign was launched yesterday by Blesma, the charity for limbless veterans, and The Drive Project, the creative social enterprise.

The campaign trains limbless veterans to turn their personal stories of overcoming adversity into inspirational talks which then become the focus of free resilience workshops in secondary schools. So far, they have reached 20k students and aim to reach a further 30k by the end of 2019.

While the Government has recently introduced teaching resilience as part of PSHE, teachers still struggle to teach it properly, either because they lack time, resources, or feel ill-equipped to deal with some of the problems their children might face (Blesma have conducted a survey with YouGov amongst teachers to verify this).

For secondary school kids, who get a huge amount of their information via social media, breaking out of the echo chambers that often skew their world view can be extremely difficult, and requires a lot of resilience. Our campaign is called Making Generation R (as in creating a generation of resilient young people) and it aims to raise awareness of the need to teach resilience differently and in contexts where students will understand its usefulness.

Here is a link to the website: http://www.makinggenerationr.com/ where you can find details of the campaign and workshops including videos highlighting its benefit for students and teachers.

What can we offer?

• We appreciate that this isn’t ‘new news’, but we thought it could be relevant in the future if you’re covering students’ well-being, or the importance of teaching resilience
• We have lots of spokespeople available – the campaign lead (Alice Driver), limbless veterans who conduct the workshops (Simon Harmer and Darren Swift) and case studies of a teacher (Dan Gentry) and student (Jahnvi Gada) who have participated and benefited from the workshop
• If you’d be interested in attending a workshop or a training session for the veterans, that can, of course, be arranged