It’s a collective
The Resilience Collective is an open-source, digital learning collective initiative launched by Terre des hommes (Tdh) and UN Migration (IOM) in 2019 with the support of Meraki Labs, the Fab Foundation, UNIGE (InZone) & the Kenya Red Cross Society.
The Collective aims to develop, test and scale up innovation learning facilities and virtual spaces for the empowerment of children and youth affected by migration, including migrants, refugees and displaced people. The initiative prioritizes these specific communities, who make up about half of the 310 million people on the move worldwide, because of their continuing lack of access or exclusion from institutionalized education, social and economic national systems and services.
Together, the facilities making up the Resilience Collective have a unique combination of skills and expertise, including years of experience working in child protection, health, child labor, justice and humanitarian contexts. The Resilience Collective projects aim to leverage the use of digital technologies, the spaces housing these technologies, and the communities that surround them to improve the work we are already engaged in and expand our reach.
Partner Organizations
Resilience Innovation Facilities and a global community
There are over 1,600 fab labs globally, and the number is rapidly increasing. They constitute a diverse global community of people working on new educational models, local fabrication and new ways of increasing resilience while being globally connected. The idea of fab labs for development work and humanitarian action was originally developed by Olivier Delarue and David Ott at the Global Humanitarian Lab (GHL) in 2016 and is now piloted by us, The Resilience Collective. Supported and organized by Terre des hommes (Tdh), the collective is working with a diverse collection of organizations to develop best practices and resources that can be used in development and humanitarian work, either by creating new facilities, or by using existing tools and spaces.
We want to make sure the developed resources are widely shared and can be used by any humanitarian organization around the globe. This includes not only knowledge about the machines, tools and materials, but also resources around training of personnel, integration of PSS activities, solutions for shelter, energy and much more. Check out the image below to get a good overview.
From a recent review of the network in collaboration with the Fab Foundation, we found that over 75% of the fab labs who responded already consider themselves a ‘Social impact’ lab, and are happy to share the majority of workshops and projects developed for their programs. This means we can iterate as a global community, and tap into vast resources on (safe) use of machines and tools in diverse locations.
We have seen fab labs attract teenagers, a normally hard to reach demographic, with their technology and keep them interested over long periods of time. This heralds opportunities for better child protection, and better educational opportunities for those in less fortunate environments. Fab labs are in that sense a means to an end – better protection, better detection of abuse, more contact time for education, better community development..
