Community Resilience Interventions to Promote Health and Health-Seeking Behaviors Among Youth: A Practitioner’s Guide

This practitioners guide is based on a USAID report authored by Chowa et al., 2022. The report is a systematic review that examines and assesses promising practices and service gaps, and understandings of the specific pathways between community resilience and youth health outcomes. Indeed, in the health sector, and particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), community resilience research and practice are still nascent, providing a timely opportunity for a review of the service landscape to direct efforts moving forward. Drawing on extensive surveys of the literature to date, the report (a) offers key points of guidance for community resilience programming that prioritizes positive health outcomes for youth and (b) summarizes the research processes that yielded these points of guidance. It serves as a roadmap for interventionists to plan and execute high-impact programming that also recognizes the current gaps in the youth-oriented community resilience field.

This practitioners guide draws on the larger report but focuses on the key takeaways for the practitioner with the goals of condensing findings to provide pointed nuggets of information and provides evidence-based intervention models. The systematic review should be consulted for theoretical and methodological underpinnings as such details are not presented in this guide.