Resilience Across Borders Inc.

RESILIENCE ACROSS BORDERS INC. IS DEDICATED TO INCREASING ACCESS TO MENTAL HEALTH INTERVENTIONS FOR ALL CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS. IN ADDITION TO DIRECT INTERVENTIONS, WE ALSO TRAIN EDUCATORS AND MENTAL HEALTH PRACTITIONERS AND CONDUCT RESEARCH .

When mental well-being is prioritized, children can fully unleash their potential and everyone benef

Goal One: More than double our program's reach by expanding to new locations and exploring new partnerships.

Goal Two: Increase awareness of our mission and programs, and increase supporter/volunteer engagement.

Goal Three: Increase donations, grants, and other revenue to support program growth.

Resilience Across Borders joined the Nonprofit Development Center of Maryland Nonprofits, which granted access to materials, webinars, and trainings related to every aspect of nonprofit management and success. The Executive Director and Board of Directors have used these resources to improve their leadership. Most recently, the Executive Director participated in a 6-part training series and is using information gained to apply for accreditation from the Standards for Excellence Institute.

From 2015 to 2020, Resilience Across Borders trained clinical psychologists and graduate students to deliver the Resilience Builder Program® (RBP) to small groups of students in underserved schools in Maryland and Washington, DC. RBP is a group therapy program that has been clinically proven to help children in private practice and school settings. It is designed to help youth bounce back from the challenges in their lives by increasing confidence, self-esteem, self-control, and the use of coping strategies. For twelve weeks, our clinicians went directly into elementary schools and worked with children who school counselors, teachers, or administrators had identified as needing additional support. Using this approach, we were able to support about 200 children in total. Our research shows that our program not only supported students' mental health, but also increased academic engagement. When schools transitioned to virtual learning and we were unable to run our groups, we used the time to adapt our programming to reach an even greater number of students at once. We conducted surveys with local teachers to see which resilience skills would be most beneficial for their students and how much time they could spend per session. Using their feedback, we adapted RBP’s evidence-based approach to the classroom environment. The new Resilience Builder Program-Universal™ lessons are segmented into short activities to facilitate its implementation alongside the standard academic curriculum. It focuses on helping children develop the protective factors associated with resilience, such as self-regulation and a proactive orientation toward life, and includes letters to parents with tips on building resilience skills at home. We piloted the program in one school this spring and used feedback to improve our program further. We are now training 10 teachers this fall to deliver the program to their entire class, supporting about 200 students total.