Welcome
Colors of Kindness (Colors) is an initiative led by Amal Alliance. It is a multi-award-winning EdTech solution that:
• improves children’s social and emotional competencies
• increases well-being of children, caregivers, and teachers, and
• increases access to quality inclusive education.
COLORS JOURNEY
Prior to the pandemic, Amal Alliance was dedicated to building brighter futures for displaced and disenfranchised children in Greece, Lebanon, and Turkey through education and social development programs. When the pandemic hit, it not only put already vulnerable children at further risk, but it stripped all children of their educational pursuits and ability to play with their peers. Like the rest of the world, we were forced to pivot from our traditional in person classes and explore how to best leverage technology. Our ability to pivot and repackage our social and emotional expertise, created opportunities that at the time were still unknown to us.
March 2020
In March 2020, Amal Alliance spearheaded a COVID-19 Emergency Response Consortium that produced the “We Are in This Together” podcast series released in April 2020, which reached approximately 160,000 users. After a fierce competition that spanned June-August 2020, we were selected as finalists of the Humanitarian Education Accelerator (HEA) COVID 19 Challenge. Our vision was to create an education in emergencies prototype that would focus on the social and emotional wellness of the children. Working alongside our local partners, UNHCR, IDEO.org, NYU Global Ties, and other experts who provided valuable input as we set out to create a scalable model, Colors of Kindness was born. The initial concept was designed for a 10-week implementation delivered in Bangla, Rohingya, and English, which showed a phenomenal 16.5% increase in the social and emotional competencies of the children in only 10 weeks.
February 2021
We partnered with Education Above All (EAA) to include our SEL content into their project-based internet free resource bank. This partnership was key to reaching a widespread audience, so we repackaged our program into an SEL workbook, which would complement the many learning offerings EAA had. The workbook adaptation has been downloaded in 175 countries without any local marketing, and was later used at the start of the Afghan crisis as EAA quickly translated it to Dari and Pashto. With feedback validating its usefulness, and the sheer magnitude of downloads, it was clear we were meeting a need.
June 2021 – June 2022
We partnered with the EASEL Lab of Harvard Graduate School of Education for empirical validation and began preparations for an evidence based pilot of Colors of Kindness to be conducted in Greece with the Greek Ministry of Education in formal schools, as well as 6 local NGOs in urban and camp settings.
Learning Equality served as our Educational Tech Partner with their Kolibri Learning Platform powering
our digital workbooks. Using the feedback loops incorporated in the initial design, the second iteration was even more human centered and was expanded from its original 10-week format to 16-weeks to align with the academic semester. Produced in English and Greek, implementation kicked off January 2022 with 400 children across numerous contexts with both refugee and host community children.
At the same time, we were planning to launch two programs in Uganda: 1) A small scale pilot of Colors of Kindness in Nakivale, Uganda where we trained refugee teachers to conduct classes, and established a Master Training model for training in Uganda, which would cross fertilize with our second program; and, 2) Flying Colors, a combination of Colors of Kindness and Learning Equality’s Kolibri combined with academic materials implemented by Humanity For All Foundation Uganda (HAF-Uganda) taking a playful, project-based learning approach in an Internet-free learning environment for out of school learners. Uganda was less challenging in terms of content creation as English is the language of
instruction.
June-September 2022
The Greek Ministry of Education had launched a Skills Lab initiative the previous year, which
symbiotically aligned with the structure of Colors of Kindness. Given the demand from teachers for such a structured program, and the positive outcomes SEL was reaping, the Ministry was apt to scale the program nationwide from September 2022.
The Amal team worked tirelessly for 3 months to update the content from thethe feedbacks received
from teachers, added new graphic designs, created teacher training modules.
Colors of Kindness 2.0 was officially ready to be introduced to all schools in Greece.
Worldwide reach through partners
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Bangladesh Pilot
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Greece Pilot
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Uganda Nakivale Pilot
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Uganda Palabek Pilot
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Greece Scale
potential to reach
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