Resilience Across Borders is dedicated to increasing access to mental health interventions for all children and adolescents. Our research-based method helps youth build resilience so they can adapt to life’s challenges now and throughout their lives.

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

Source: Nonprofit submitted responses

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

Goal Type: Grow, expand, scale or increase access to the existing programs and services.

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

Goal Type: This goal reflects our commitment to further our advocacy work for our organization and or cause area.

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

Goal Type: Invest in the capacity of our organization (financial, management, technical, etc.).

Describe an investment in leadership

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.

This organization mobilizes for mission in the following ways:

• Strategic Partnerships

• Thought Leadership

• Raising Awareness

What are this organization’s external mobilizaton efforts?

Resilience Across Borders mobilizes externally to further our mission of increasing access to mental health resources by sharing the expertise of our Board, Advisory Council, and Research Fellows. We partner with the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA) to provide an annual free back-to-school webinar with a panel of our board members. Our "Raising Resilience" blog offers practical tips for caregivers to help their children. We also link to relevant articles from a variety of sources for our social media followers to learn more about children's mental health. We share our findings with mental healthcare providers by participating in conferences and publishing our research. Most recently, we published "Improved Resilience and Academics Following A School-based Resilience Intervention: A Randomized Controlled Trial" in the peer-reviewed journal, Evidence-Based Practice in Child and Adolescent Mental Health. We continue to collect data for future publication.

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.