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Rethinking Youth Resilience: Beyond Skills and Preparedness

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By: Shaberi Das, Researcher, Sound of Silence How do young people imagine a future for themselves when they have few opportunities to discover what they are capable of? This is a question that conventional approaches to youth development and climate resilience often leave unanswered. The emphasis tends to fall on closing the skills gap and improving employability, as though the distance between training and a viable future were chiefly a skills deficit. In climate-vulnerable rural communities, however, the relationship between learning a skill and building a future is rarely straightforward: livelihoods are precarious, environmental risks constrain choices and migration may become a response to limited options. Young people need opportunities not only to acquire skills, but to put them into practice, contribute to collective life and see their efforts make a difference. Such experiences cannot compensate for the absence of viable livelihoods or overcome the structural inequalities tha...
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Breaking the Silence, One Conversation at a Time

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By: Shaberi Das, Researcher, Sound of Silence When does care actually begin? Community mental health interventions are commonly evaluated through visible indicators: counsellors trained, referrals made, services delivered and people reached. Though indispensable measures of programme performance, they tell us relatively little about the conditions that make care possible in the first place. Before identification, referral or treatment can succeed, a less visible process of building trust and breaking the silence around emotional distress must first create the social conditions that make care possible. The Mon Majhi initiative demonstrates that it is here that community mental healthcare truly begins, with the simple act of asking: “How are you?”, and staying to listen. Fig. 1: A doorstep conversation during a routine Mon Majhi visit. Listening to the field: An archive of everyday emotional life Working in pairs across the project villages, Mon Majhi counsellors – drawn from...
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Looking Back, Looking Ahead

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Reflections on the First Phase of Sound of Silece By: Shaberi Das, Researcher, Sound of Silence As  Sound of Silence: Strengthening Tribal Women’s Voices and Leadership for Climate Risk Reduction among Tribal Communities in the Sundarbans, India  enters its Exit  Phase this year, it is an opportune moment to pause and reflect on a journey that has unfolded  over the last three years alongside tribal communities in the Indian Sundarbans. Looking  back, one of the most enduring lessons has been that resilience is not something that can be  delivered through a project and by external actors. It emerges gradually through  relationships, trust, local knowledge and the strengthening of community institutions that are  capable of sustaining change long after external support recedes. The project began with an understanding that the challenges facing these communities are deeply interconnected. Climate change, environmental degradation, livelihood ins...
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