Learning for Well-being Foundation

The Learning for Well-being Foundation is a private operating foundation, registered in the Netherlands as a non-profit organization, with the head office in Amsterdam and a branch in Brussels.
Our team and associates work remotely, running activities across Europe, Middle East, Latin America and the United States. The foundation’s collaborators include lead practitioners in the field of child participation and child well-being.

Mission

We act as a catalyst through mutually reinforcing competent partnerships aimed at bringing the voice and actions of children more fully into creating well-being for themselves and their communities.

Our programs cultivate the capacities of children, and the adults who interact with them, so that together they are able to contribute to a fairer and sustainable world, while realizing their unique potential throughout their lives. We focus on the intersection between well-being (as self-knowing) and social change through partnership between children and adults (an intergenerational competent approach to child participation).”

The foundation was created after the aspirations of two changemakers who met in an event exploring “Issues and opportunities for Peace in the Middle East” in 2004, Prof. Marwan Awartani (today Palestinian Minister of Education) and Daniel Kropf, founder of several healthcare technology companies.

Geographic Focus

International

Programme Areas

Learning for Well-being Foundation has developed all of its programs with the aim of supporting child and societal well-being through child and youth participation.

Its flagship activities include:

1. School Wellbeing Survey & Community Development
A unique survey with accompanying interventions, based on the L4WB approach, that measures and improves the level of well-being in the school community, impacting all stakeholders.
With the hope of encouraging decision makers, stakeholders and heads of educational bodies to adopt a holistic approach to education, the Learning for Well-being Foundation (L4WB-F) together with Education for Life in Israel, have developed a tool (the L4WB survey) and interventions which bring together the 3 key partners in the school community: Pupils, Professionals and Parents (3Ps’), giving them the knowledge on how to increase their experience of well-being and engaged participation within their community.
Particular focus was put on the L4WB Core Capacities in order to obtain information on the quality and quantity of these elements in the school so that we can then understand which of the capacities need further development.

2. ACT2GETHER
Our purpose with ACT2gether is to develop global alliances for creating a social movement promoting partnership between generations (children and adults). We want this in all sectors (including education, health, welfare, justice, etc.) and addressing issues affecting children and
adults in ways that are holistic and systemic.
We believe that when generations work in partnership, including peer to peer support, both children and adults benefit from each other’s qualities: spontaneity, curiosity, creativity and joy, but also fairness, accountability and drive become available to both, as shared resources.
Children and adults feel empowered to contribute fully – with their whole selves – to the creation of better spaces to live.

Our strategic priorities are:
• Create an international social movement that promotes and supports partnership between generations (children and adults)
• Facilitate global, regional and national gatherings to promote children and adults working together
• Provide learning experiences for people to understand and develop participatory practice
• Create alliances both off and online that link an international community and shares stories promoting child-adult partnerships
ACT2gether is a global brand to which local initiatives can associate themselves, as part of social movement promoting partnership between generations.

The 3 activities that support the movement internationally are: 2getherLand (event); 2getherLearn (training) and 2getherLink (off-line and online platform for alliances), all supported by transversal research.

All ACT2gether activities:
• are organized through partnership between children and adults
• combine personal development and social action
• create fairness and sustainability

Currently there are active ACT2gether sites in Latin America, Germany, Palestine and the Netherlands.

3. Measuring What Matters – Research on Core Capacities
The purpose of this research, has been to assess what a comprehensive review of the existing literature can tell us about core capacities, using the L4WB framework as the conceptual frame.
The aim is to understand if such precursors to life skills can add value to concepts designed to promote child development, and related public policies, and further to identify what constitutes good practice for promotion and protection of these skills.
L4WB-F is partnering with UNICEF’s Office of Research, Innocenti, and the US based Fetzer Foundation for this research effort.

4. Workgroup on Personalized and Formative Assessment Practices
This project aims at identifying and documenting assessment practices that are aligned with the L4WB approach. The outcome will produce knowledge and practices transferable to all our well-being and intergenerational collaboration programs.
This project aims to look for and into already existing innovative and interesting good assessment practices. We know that there are teachers and schools who work efficiently with alternative assessment methods, and it would be inspirational for educational settings to get acquainted with those in a well-documented way by adding information.
This project is done in cooperation with the Hungarian Waldorf Federation and the European Council of Steiner Waldorf Education.

5. Learning for Well-being Community
We have been building relationships around the Learning for Well-being perspective and framework with selected education, health, and child welfare organisations that are operating at European and national levels for many years now. Several of these relationships have been formalized through Memoranda of Understanding. In January 2015 the L4WB Community was formally established through a meeting of all partners in Caux, Switzerland. This created an opportunity for the partners to know each other and their work, to experiment with tools and practices together, and to envision joint projects inspired by the L4WB-Foundation. These meetings are for organisations that are actively seeking new ways to work together, specifically to develop capacities for competent relationships and systems for children and those who support them. From these gatherings, new partnerships and projects are born, using the Learning for Well-being principles to inspire a common language.