01
Quality assurance for child protection at the design stage of humanitarian programmes
Children are among those worst affected by humanitarian crises, yet emergency programmes are designed and delivered sector by sector at speed, which makes it hard for child protection standards to be reflected consistently across every programme plan. Review depends on a small number of specialists, so the responses with the least capacity are the ones that skip it first. Social Change Studio is building an AI-assisted quality assurance tool that reviews programme and implementation documents in advance, surfaces child protection risk signals and quality gaps, and records both the basis for each judgement and the points of uncertainty, so that the final decision stays with the people in the field.
02
Secondary traumatic stress and occupational safety among frontline workers supporting survivors of violence
Frontline workers are the first to meet children and women who have experienced violence, and repeated exposure to their testimony and to the scenes themselves produces secondary traumatic stress. This is a hazard inherent in the work rather than a personal weakness, but nationwide prevention systems, peer support structures inside organisations, and employers’ duty of care under occupational safety law are all frequently absent. Social Change Studio measures the conditions of this workforce with standardised instruments to make them visible, develops prevention and peer support training that adapts international humanitarian staff care standards to the conditions of services here, and builds the policy case for treating secondary trauma in the language of occupational safety.
03
Innovative approaches to MHPSS for children and adolescents in humanitarian settings
In humanitarian settings — disasters, armed conflict, large-scale disease outbreaks, the climate crisis — mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) for children and adolescents is still often a scaled-down adult model, or stops at short psychoeducation. Social Change Studio brings together trauma-informed practice, designs that work with caregivers and families, a gender lens, and current approaches to psychotherapy that address body, mind and emotion together, to develop intervention theory and programme models that work for children and adolescents in crisis. We begin from child participation and survivor-centred principles, respect the cultural context and the coping resources children and families already hold, and build in forms that can be tested in the field.
04
A family-based conversation toolkit that protects financial self-determination in later life
As cognitive function begins to change in later life, protection and self-determination come into conflict over financial decisions, and conflict within the family arrives together with a narrowing of rights. Social Change Studio designs and field-tests conversation and agreement tools that older people and their families use together, before a crisis occurs. The standard we hold to is that the person remains the one who decides, rather than the object of protection.