This is a testimony of someone who was highly motivated to do good for poverty stricken people (and not the One Percent) and sought out and was hired by an NGO supposedly doing good. She was soon trained to forget about thinking of real solutions to poverty, instead she was trained to encourage poor people to become more self-reliant, and to measure self-reliance.
The story the campaign told was a story of lost resilience. The narrative they preached was how to get it back. This is a common theme in community work. Over the years the term “resilience” has been applied more and more frequently to people in distressed communities to mean their capacity to bounce back from dysfunction or breakdown. Increasing community resilience becomes a solution to chronic barriers such as poverty, trauma, and class inequity. Dozens of programs that encourage resiliency have been introduced in schools and low-income neighborhoods all over the world in an effort to help children recover from trauma and also cope better with their day-to-day stresses.
