No Limit Generation Featured in Innovations in Global Mental Health Publication

Springer Nature has published “Innovations in Global Mental Health”, which looks at the emerging challenges in global mental health. No Limit Generation and our work with Dr. Patricia Gerbarg and Dr. Richard Brown of Breath-Body-Mind was featured in one of the chapters, Innovative Programs Support Recovery and Resiliency in Adult and Child Survivors of Mass Disasters: Breath-Based Mind-Body Interventions and Global Platforms. The potential to take the practical teachings of mental health experts that can effectively reduce symptoms of stress and trauma among children, and provide assistance through online platforms like the one here at Nolimitgen.org, can make mental heath support accessibly like it never has before. The ability to translate this information into every language for open access globally can revolutionize global mental health and change the world. No Limit Generation is currently looking to create trainings to help the situations in Ukraine, Ethiopia, Yemen and Syria among other places around the globe.

Accessible Strategies to Support Children’s Mental Health and Wellbeing in Emergencies: Experience from the Rohingya Refugee Camp – NLG’S ACCESSIBLE AND SCALABLE MODEL

Author(s): Samier Mansur
Source: Journal on Education in Emergencies, Vol. 7 No. 1 (June 2021), pp. 150-163

NLG’S ACCESSIBLE AND SCALABLE MODEL
NLG’s needs assessment revealed that frontline aid workers, parents, and caregivers
in the Rohingya refugee camps do not have adequate training or the resources they
need to address the unique challenges faced by their children. To help fill this gap,
we launched a global online training platform designed to give caregivers the critical
guidance they need to stabilize, protect, and heal vulnerable children and restore their
well-being. NLG’s platform is built on the idea that frontline aid workers, parents, and
caregivers can help children develop resilience and even reverse the negative impact
of toxic stress or trauma. Guidance provided includes the following:

  1. Create safe, structured, and inclusive environments for children to play
    in every day. The availability of safe, predictable, and inclusive environments
    where children can play and interact with others is healing for those who may
    have lost the social safety nets they once had.
  2. Engage children through informed, trustworthy, and supportive adults.
    When adult caregivers are informed and engaged as trusted role models,
    their presence plays a critical role in a child’s healthy development (National
    Scientific Council on the Developing Child 2020).
  3. Believe in children’s potential to heal and live a fulfilled life. When adult
    caregivers see a child as strong, resilient, and adaptive, the child no longer
    views themself as “broken” or in need of “fixing.” When caregivers believe in
    a child’s limitless potential, the child has a broader vision of the possibilities
    available to them in life.

The NLG platform supports existing global interventions and training programs
with an open-access digital library of information on child well-being, which is
informed by mental health and psychosocial support standards and adheres to
the six core principles outlined in the IASC Guidelines on Mental Health and
Psychosocial Support in Emergency Settings. ECD and child health professionals are
invited to use the platform, based on their previous experience and proven impact
in the field. NLG works with these professionals to create a curriculum, which is
then presented to the professionals, caregivers, and youth-serving professionals
via the training platform website through an engaging short video series; it is
also available online at www.nolimitgen.org.
The platform training content is integrative, trauma-informed, and evidence-based.
The ECD training videos for frontline staff in the Rohingya refugee camps are
translated, adapted to the local culture, and dubbed into the local Rohingya
language. They are designed to be either self-led or led by an instructor in a group
setting. Integral to the effectiveness of the NLG content is its unique human-centered communications approach, which was developed with feedback from
frontline aid workers, parents, and caregivers to ensure that it is
• clear, engaging, and actionable;
• easy to access through online and offline modes;
• useful for frontline aid workers, parents, and caregivers of all education
levels;
• evidence-based, culturally informed, and relevant; and
• connective—in other words, emotionally engaging through everyday
language, storytelling, and approachable experts on both cognitive and
an emotional level.
Accessibility and localization are the central components of the human-centered
communications approach. Consistent with how end-users and other beneficiaries
currently access media content, training materials should be easily accessible
online (web and mobile phone) and offline (offline mobile phone and thumb
drives). NLG suggests that to be consistent with the realities in the field, the
content should be delivered in a way that is comprehensible to all levels of literacy,
and to all education and professional backgrounds.

Localization helps to ensure that the NLG training content is accurate, culturally
informed, and culturally relevant. NLG works with Translators without Borders
to develop localized glossaries of key terms, translate scripts into local languages,
and adapt scripts to fit local customs and culture, and then dub content with
local voiceover actors to achieve professional results. This process enables NLG
to maintain a high quality of translation and training results.

ACCESSIBLE STRATEGIES TO SUPPORT CHILDREN’S MENTAL HEALTH AND WELL-BEING IN EMERGENCIES ( INTRODUCTION)

Author(s): Samier Mansur
Source: Journal on Education in Emergencies, Vol. 7 No. 1 (June 2021), pp. 150-163

Fifty Rohingya girls and boys from Myanmar sat packed under the shade of a
makeshift tent, unsure how to respond to the question I asked them: “What do
you want to be when you grow up?” It dawned on me in that moment that no
one had asked them this question since they arrived in their new surroundings.
Indeed, perhaps no one had ever asked them this question.
One year earlier, these children’s lives were violently uprooted. Their homes
and villages were burned down, their fathers were executed and their mothers
gang-raped by soldiers at gunpoint, and their siblings were flung into burning
huts. As Rohingya refugees fled into Bangladesh, humanitarian agencies were
overwhelmed by what they called a children’s crisis, as more than 60 percent of
the nearly one million Rohingya refugees were children (Alexander 2017). With
refugee displacement around the world currently lasting an average of 25 years
(“Contribution to the Fifteenth” 2017), these Rohingya children are likely to reach
adulthood in the camps.
When they first arrived in the camps, it quickly became clear what these children
had endured. Clutching crayons in their tiny hands, they expressed on paper
what they were battling within, using green for army uniforms, orange for fire,
black for machine guns, brown for lifeless bodies, and red for blood. I had never
seen crayons used in this way until that day. I was in the tent with the children
because it was a part of a child-friendly space (CFS) I founded in partnership
with the JAAGO Foundation, a local Bangladeshi organization dedicated to the
education and welfare of underserved children, whose name means “WAKE UP!”
in Bengali. JAAGO Foundation provides schooling for children in the slums and
remote parts of the country who historically have fallen outside the jurisdiction
of government schools. We named this place the Safe Haven and designed it as
a space of protection, learning, and healing for 500 Rohingya refugee children
ages 4 to 15 who were survivors of genocide.
My task as a founder and initial trustee of Safe Haven was to ensure that local aid
workers and facility coordinators received the necessary mental health training
to play a healing role in the children’s lives. During this process, I made the
startling observation that aid workers, parents, and caregivers (the adults who

play the most influential role in a child’s life) on the front lines of conflict and
crisis zones do not have adequate access to training or the resources they need
to help children—especially the youngest—work through the unique challenges
to their mental health and wellbeing.
I sought to learn more about early childhood development (ECD) training
approaches and the accessibility gap by conducting a series of interviews and focus
groups with members of leading humanitarian agencies and local nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs). Thus I learned the true extent of the problem—or, indeed,
the open secret that this challenge is not unique to the Rohingya refugee camps
but a systemic global challenge with far-reaching consequences. Fortunately, we
now have an opportunity to address it in a meaningful way.
After founding Safe Haven, I launched No Limit Generation (NLG), a global
platform to provide aid workers, ECD professionals, educators, parents, and
youth-serving professionals the critical training and resources they need to
address child wellbeing. NLG partnered with JAAGO Foundation and global
humanitarian organizations to implement training programs. NLG works with
leading professionals to create engaging video training curricula designed to
help local and international organizations respond more effectively to the mental
health and ECD needs of children, both broadly and specifically, and to address
the most pressing issues faced by children. NLG’s pilot launched in May 2019, and
its open-access platform has had promising results with frontline aid workers,
parents, and caregivers. Based on the pilot results (detailed below), the NLG
platform has helped its partner organizations in the Rohingya refugee camps in
Bangladesh develop literacy in child wellbeing and mental health. To date, the
platform has been accessed in 100 countries by approximately 15,000 frontline
professionals, parents, and other caregivers.
This field note, a contribution to the field of ECD in emergencies in which I
share my team’s research, experience, and insights, provides a snapshot of my key
takeaways from our work on the ground from my perspective as the organization’s
founder. I describe NLG’s innovative approach to training practitioners and how it
emerged from field research that included interviews and focus group discussions
with frontline humanitarian agencies and local NGOs working in the Rohingya
refugee camps in Bangladesh. I also offer practical insights for practitioners
who support ECD in emergency contexts, including the untapped potential of
using technology to provide staff training, the effectiveness of a human-centered
communications approach to enhance training outcomes, and key challenges to
consider for future programming.

Accessible Strategies to Support Children’s Mental Health and Wellbeing in Emergencies: Experience from the Rohingya Refugee Camp (Abstract)

Image from UNICEF
From: Journal on Education in Emergencies, Vol. 7 No. 1 (June 2021), pp. 150-163
Author Samier Mansur

More than half a billion children globe-wide currently live in conflict or crisis
contexts (UNICEF 2016), including more than 30 million displaced and refugee
children (UNICEF 2020). The extreme and often prolonged adversity suffered in
these environments can have lifelong physical, psychological, and socioeconomic
consequences for children, and thus for society, and can affect an entire generation.
Despite these dire consequences, less than 0.14 percent of global humanitarian financial
aid is allocated to child mental health (Save the Children 2019). Frontline aid workers
and parents and guardians often lack access to early childhood development training
and to the resources needed to meaningfully address the unique challenges faced by
children living in crisis and conflict environments, including their mental health and
wellbeing. To meet this critical knowledge and resource gaps, No Limit Generation, a
nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC, developed a video training platform
to equip frontline aid workers, parents, and guardians across the globe to support the
well-being of vulnerable children. No Limit Generation then conducted a monthlong
pilot study in the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh to test this technology-driven
training approach. In this field note, we describe our program design and
pilot findings, which we consider a possible strategy for delivering sustainable and
scalable early childhood development training and resources to workers on the front
lines. Our hope is that this innovative work will help young children around the world
heal, grow, thrive, and ultimately achieve their full potential.

NLG is Hiring a New CEO

Interested in joining a dynamic team of innovators, dreamers, and world-changers? Are you a leader who can take NLG’s mission to the next level? Experienced in mental health, education, ed-tech, or non-profits? This might be for you!

Apply Now

Reclaiming Hope and Belonging for Youth Leaving Institutional Care in Uganda

Currently, an estimated 50,000 children live in institutions and orphanages throughout Uganda. Children living in an institution often experience abuse, cruelty, and/or neglect that impacts their mental health. When children age out of institutionalized care systems they are ill-equipped to manage their mental health and have not developed the necessary life skills to live independently. Between 80-90% of Ugandan children in orphanages have families they have been separated from due to an inability to provide the medical, educational, and social services that the child needs. 

Attachment is a necessary and inevitable part of human development. A young child’s attachment to their caregiver(s) determines how they form relations as children, adults, and with themselves, as well as their self-image and sense of belonging/purpose. These relationships are key to how children, young people, and, in particular, care leavers (children who have aged out of orphanages) might cope with and recover from trauma. 

We know that children develop best and reach their full potential when they live in family environments. 

No Limit Generation, Child’s i Foundation, and Makerere University have teamed up on a project delivering mental health care to institutionalized children, caregivers, and Ugandan orphanages. The project is the result of a Canada Grand Challenges grant that seeks scalable and youth-led solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges. The Project aims to increase the availability of mental health services, curb the spread of orphanages and support vulnerable children and care leavers with the family and community support they need to succeed. Currently, less than 1% of the Uganda national health budget is allocated to mental health.  

This project is unique in that the curriculum was designed using feedback from the youth, and their perspective of the challenges that they faced and has a human-centered communication process. The focus is a three-pronged approach in demonstrating an alternative to orphanages. First, an emphasis on prevention by working with the government to strengthen services that can respond to families in need. Second, creating a foster care type system for children who are unable to return to their families of origin, preferably in locations near their biological families. Kafalah is the Islamic practice of guardianship of orphaned children. Third, helping orphanages transition to non-residential community centers to assist families and help prevent separation

NLG Featured at 2021 CIES Conference


At the 65th Annual Meeting of the Comparative and International Education Society, No Limit Generation Founder and CEO Samier Mansur, presented on the panel, Early childhood development in conflict and crisis contexts: Innovative approaches and emerging evidence from the field.

Informed by his experience in the Rohingya refugee camps, Mansur shared scalable strategies to support children’s mental health and well-being in emergencies.

NLG Featured at International Center for Breathwork’s Breathing Festival

“The quality of our world, is the direct result of our actions. Our actions, are the direct result of our thoughts. Our thoughts… Believe it or not, can be altered by your breath.” 

Samier Mansur

No Limit Generation’s Founder and CEO, Samier Mansur, was a guest speaker at the International Center for Breathwork’s Breathing Festival where he highlighted 10 tools for effective leadership & stress management.

Click below for a short preview on how you can become an intentional & purpose driven leader!

Watch Now

NLG Featured on Extreme Uncertainty Podcast

Check out Extreme Uncertainty, a podcast highlighting today’s entrepreneurs. NLG’s Founder and CEO, Samier Mansur is featured in the episode Mission Driven in which he discusses starting and sustaining a tech-based non-profit as well as the challenges that often accompany launching a startup. 

Listen to this brief clip about the roots of NLG’s mission to enrich the lives of children.

“If we as the adults know how to create the supportive conditions for them and show up for them in the right way, then we can set them on a healthy trajectory that sets them on a course for life success and resiliency.”

Samier Mansur, Founder & CEO of No Limit Generation

For the full interview listen now on Anchor, Spotify and other podcasts streaming services.

NLG Featured at Thrive Healing Summit

In partnership with the North Valley Community Foundation, NLG Founder and CEO, Samier Mansur presents Thrive: A Children’s Resilience Initiative. Join us in exploring how we can provide children with greater access to mental health support. 


Watch the full video now on Youtube!