Adversity in life creates a hunger for food, for identity, for emotional sustenance and validation of self. These are burning needs that cannot be assuaged from within the fragmentation and limitations inherent to adverse circumstances. Children and young adults, those who have suffered neglect, abuse and failure, the lost and the wandering, find a welcome into the world of care that Dream a Dream offers.

Started in the year 1999, Dream a Dream is a charitable trust which is impacting the lives of young people from adverse backgrounds. Over the years of engagement with this demographic segment, Dream a Dream has extensive experiential data to show that adversity affects the ability of these young people to engage with the world, make healthy life choices and more significantly, to ‘Thrive’.

Dream a Dream has crafted a pedagogical method and a process, a science that allows for a re-definition of adverse circumstances by changing the lens through which the past is viewed. Extended immersion within the nonjudgmental and enabling ethos facilitated by Dream a Dream, allows for the emergence of Personhood and integration of the divided self which may be called ‘Thriving’.

The core question that Dream a Dream wishes to address is: What does Thriving look like? How does it manifest? How can the understanding of ‘Thriving’ be nuanced? To address these questions, Ethnographic Research, using the Case Study Method, was undertaken by Quantum Consumer Solutions Pvt. Ltd over a period of 3 months, from August to November 2018 and the result was a report that establishes a definition of Thriving in the context of adversity. The report further deepens the understanding of various facets of Thriving through a Map of Thriving. This map provides a definitive framework to help design programmatic interventions focused on Thriving for key stakeholders such as parents, educators, non-profits and policymakers.

The report is available for download here – http://bit.ly/2KzltiX