SParking Wellbeing

SParking Wellbeing: A Toolkit for Adolescent-Led Appreciative Enquiry During Humanitarian Response helps create adolescents’ agency and leadership as enquirers, solution providers and influencers in their own lives, as well as in their communities. The title, SParking Wellbeing brings together the idea of setting off a burst of activity (sparking), and the solid work towards that mobilisation, represented through the running analogy of rebuilding a neighbourhood park (parking), and the nurturing that goes into it; gathering tools, preparing material, weeding, and finally sowing the seeds of change. The process laid out in the toolkit helps adolescents build resilience and a sense of identity and purpose. It helps them connect to their peers, their families, and communities, and develop awareness of the contexts that influence their resilience and vulnerabilities. It helps adolescents develop into active local and global citizens, who take self and social action to enhance their personal wellbeing and bring about the changes they wish to see in the world. The tool also supports adolescents to engage constructively with gender and age-based hierarchies in their families, communities and in society. A partnership between the Adolescent Development and Participation (ADAP) section of the UNICEF Regional Office South Asia (ROSA) and ComMutiny - the Youth Collective, this initiative contributes and adds value to the UNICEF responses in health, education, child protection, social protection and other areas of work. The tool can be used across UNICEF sectors, and within planning processes of government departments and ministries, to encourage adolescent-led enquiry in planning and review. In addition to the tools and guidelines available in this manual, UNICEF’s Adolescent Kit for Expression and Innovation3 is also useful for facilitators to build overall capacities for adolescent engagement and for specific activities and processes that can be run with adolescents as preliminary work.