ResilienceLinks Webinar | Resilient Youth and Their Social Ecology

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"Resilient Youth and Their Social Ecology" was produced by ResilienceLinks, in partnership with USAID’s Center for Resilience, on September 29th, 2022. Check out the event recording and slides to learn from our speakers on how the resilience of youth both supports and depends upon the people, groups and institutions in their environment, and to learn about findings from USAID's resilience programming with youth. Watch the recording now.

This event will be recorded, and the recording will be shared following the event.

Speaker Information

Jane Lowicki-Zucca serves as Senior Youth Advisor within USAID’s Bureau for Resilience and Food Security, where she works to strengthen the Agency’s efforts to engage youth in agriculture-led growth, nutrition, resilience and water security, sanitation and hygiene activities. Jane previously served as Program Director with GOAL Uganda, leading the $21M Driving Youth-led New Agribusiness and Microenterprise in Northern Uganda program, a flagship youth-focused market systems development program. Jane has held various positions with NGOs and the United Nations across three decades of humanitarian and development service, with an emphasis on youth development. As Director of the Women’s Refugee Commission, IRC’s Children and Adolescents Project, Jane pioneered participatory approaches to working with conflict-affected young people in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Uganda. Jane authored the seminal Untapped Potential: Adolescents Affected by Armed Conflict, among numerous other studies and reports and has served as an Adjunct Faculty member at New York University. She earned her BA in Government from Cornell University. She also holds an MPA from New York University, where she was a Reynolds Social Entrepreneurship Fellow.

Dr. Christine Allison is a pragmatic, mixed-methods researcher and evaluator with over 20 years of experience in international development. She has worked in 56 countries with a philosophy of instilling capacity and leveraging local knowledge to meet development challenges related to poverty alleviation, education, economic growth, and human rights. Her work has included research on a range of issues such as youth engagement; structural transformation; education reform; child welfare reform; human trafficking; gender relations; domestic violence; post-war ethnic reconciliation; deinstitutionalization of people with disabilities; gender-sensitive evaluation; and measuring social change. Dr. Allison has conducted research and evaluations for a range of clients, including the philanthropic sector, USAID, FCDO, and the U.S. Departments of State, Labor, Agriculture, and Homeland Security. Dr. Allison completed her undergraduate and master’s-level graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University, and she received her PhD in Organizational Leadership and Policy Development from the University of Minnesota.

Rita Larok is a public health specialist with a social work background. She has specialized training, programming and design experience in various fields including graduation approach programs,  economic inclusion, livelihoods, food security and nutrition, mental health, psychosocial dynamics,  social protection, education and health. Rita has worked with various groups of people including the poor, those with disabilities, youth and adolescents, orphans and other vulnerable children and people with chronic illnesses including HIV/AIDS. She has worked for over 17 years within both development and humanitarian settings serving in various technical and managerial roles. Additionally, Rita has contributed to several publications related to graduation and economic inclusion. Currently, Rita is the Chief of Party for the Graduating to Resilience Activity, a USAID BHA-funded activity in Kamwenge, Uganda that seeks to graduate at least 13,200 extremely poor refugees and Ugandan households from conditions of food insecurity and fragile livelihoods to self-reliance and resilience.

Ariganyira Ronald holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and a certificate in Agriculture. Ronald is a youth who has exhibited tremendous growth capacity, gained exposure and possesses great level of practical experience in facilitation skills, problem solving, community mobilization, business coaching, VSLA and Farmer Filed and Business School (FFBs) methodology that impacts his home communities. He presently works with the AVSI Foundation as a Community Based Trainer under the USAID BHA-funded Graduating to Resilience Activity in Kamwenge, Uganda, where he works towards building household and ultimately youth resilience in the face of chronic food insecurity and fragile livelihoods.