foundations Archives - Citywise

The importance of: Social and Emotional Learning and Character growth

(2 minutes read) At Citywise we believe that social-emotional learning and character growth go hand in hand in empowering and supporting young people to unlock their potential. Here we review how they are important and how they are connected according to Dr. Arthur Schwartz, a leading figure in research and practice in the field of […]

Projector Craft

Sometimes we need to find motivation to be resilient and many crafts and games can help with this. The projector craft is no exception! This fun craft encourages creativity as well as creating a space for children to actively think about bravery and resilience. Motivation can be hard to find when we fail at something […]

Scoop the Cotton challenge!

This game is a great chance to test your resilience! Completing tasks and activities like this one gives you a chance to develop a growth mindset and become more resilient. You can read more about the growth mindset and resilience by clicking the links below: Growth mindset Resilience Activities like this one can help you […]

Mantra

Sometimes we can lack encouragement and motivation to do things or to continue with tasks. This mantra activity helps children to motivate themselves, and get back up and try again if they failed the first time. It not only helps to build resilience, but to develop a growth mindset. According to research, these two skills […]

Resilience: What is it? Why do we need it?

During their time at Citywise, kids explore different topics in order to build their understanding of self-worth. At Citywise, we believe that resilience is one of the most important topics. To be resilient is to bounce back when you’re faced with a challenge in life. We often use the image of a marshmallow to explain […]

Magic Wands

Attention parents! Read out the below passages to your child to engage them in this fun and thought-provoking activity! Imagine this scene: a wizard visits your family home and gives everyone in your family magic wands that have the ability to change things! If you could change one thing in the entire world, what would […]

Goal Mood Boards

In order for us to set goals, we need to figure out what we want in life. This Goal Mood Board activity is a fantastic one to do with family and children, because it prompts us to communicate and express our ideas, hopes and dreams with our loved ones. Creating an artistic representation of your […]

Overcoming the drop

Have you ever set yourself a goal, started with great enthusiasm but quickly hit a snag in the road? A distraction, a difficult experience, the feeling of failure, or creeping self doubt can pull you off track from where you were heading. We understand this as the drop, and if you’re familiar with it, you’re […]

11 home activities to boost kids mental health

To celebrate Mental Health Week 2021, our wonderful volunteers made videos of simple, fun, activities to boost children’s mental health.

The year the world changed forever

(2 minute read) It sounds like the title for a dystopian movie, but reality has been far stranger than fiction. The past year has posed extraordinary challenges for everyone as the Covid-19 crisis has swept the world, but although we are all in the same storm, we are not all in the same boat. Families […]

The Gift of Friendship

(3 minute read) This year has been an extraordinary one. Not in the way that you might describe a solar eclipse, or the birth of a child. But in the way you might describe living during a global pandemic, watching the world change forever. We may have found ourselves uttering new phrases like ‘corona-coaster’, ‘zoom-fatigue’, […]

Make your Families Wishes Come True

(4-minute read) 2020. A new year and a new decade. The New Year brings the opportunity to reflect on the past year and on the future. We have discussed in other blogs how reflecting on ourselves and our experiences, as well as being aware of our desires for the future will motivate us towards growth! […]

How To Raise Strong Children

(4-minute read) Self Knowledge is one of the key foundational steps in our curriculum. It is important to know who we are, our strengths and development areas in order to know how we would like to grow, and who we would like to become. At Citywise we believe that we all have more strengths than […]

Growing in Self Knowledge

The first of the seven key areas that make up the Citywise curriculum is Self Knowledge. During our first few sessions we reflect on who we are. We think about the different things that make up our character and that make up “me”. We explore what has influenced who we are today, and think about […]

The group setting: Responding to problems with continuity

Youth mentoring programmes are common around the world as prevention programmes. However, evaluation of such programmes finds again and again that their positive effects are small in magnitude (DuBois et al., 2011). Therefore, it is becoming increasingly clear that we cannot simply assume that pairing up any young person with a mentor will automatically lead […]

25 years of mentoring

The text below is adapted from a speech delivered by Citywise Chief Executive Luke Wilkinson at our 25th Anniversary celebration events, on 13th March 2019 in Glasgow, and 22nd March 2019 in Manchester. I’m going to tell you a bit about Citywise in a moment, but before that I’d like to start by asking you […]

How to: Deal With Stress Purposefully

How do we respond when we are in high-stress situations? Our bodies react in certain ways: Fight, flight or freeze. This is to protect us from dangers, but in everyday parenting often the situations we are in aren’t necessarily dangerous to us or our child, yet we still react the same. At Citywise we know […]

The Importance of: A curriculum

Youth mentoring programmes are popular around the world as prevention and intervention programmes. However, evaluation of such programmes has repeatedly found that positive effects are often small in magnitude (DuBois et al., 2011). Why such small effects? It’s time to move towards more supervised, structured and targeted mentoring programmes. Lyons, McQullin and Henderson (2018) recently analysed […]

Launch of Citywise Centre in Manchester!

It was 24 years ago this month (it’s August 2018 as I write this) that a group of students in Manchester ran a holiday club for local children in Hulme, just round the corner from the current Citywise offices. They wanted to offer a safe, positive environment for young people during the long summer holiday: […]

How to: Build Resilience in Children

Resilience is essentially our capacity to bounce back from stressful or challenging experiences and is one of the key Citywise strengths. It is an important strength to build in young people, and it can be developed from a young age. Read on for three top-tips adapted from author Donna Jackson Nakazawa and psychologist Rick Hanson, […]

SGOOP

This is the second of 2 articles on the topic of “promoting lasting change.” Click here for part 1. Besides learning about how to make goals SMART, young people in Citywise learn about SGOOP, an interesting strategy that has been found to be most helpful in achieving our goals. This is a helpful tool that […]

Making Resolutions Stick

This is the first of 2 articles on the topic of “promoting lasting change.” Click here for part 2. At least once a year, many of us set resolutions, or goals, with the hope of achieving lasting change in our lives. While it is simple to set goals, it can be tricky to ensure that […]

Why Mentoring?

This post highlights some of the reasons and research findings that back our mentoring approach. At Citywise, we work in partnership with schools and families to empower young people to take hold of their futures, grow in character and the skills needed to succeed in today’s world, and positively contribute to society. One of the […]

The Importance of: Self-control

Our character curriculum is centred on building four key character traits discussed in relation to human flourishing and success since the times of Classical Greek Philosophy: resilience, self-control, good judgement and fairness. Why do we focus on these traits? This series, called “The importance of”, explores the importance of each of these four traits. Self-control includes being able to […]

The Importance of: Fairness

Our character curriculum is centred on building four key character traits discussed in relation to human flourishing and success since the times of Classical Greek Philosophy: resilience, self-control, good judgement and fairness. Why do we focus on these traits? This series, called “The importance of”, explores the importance of each of these four traits. Growing in fairness includes […]

The Importance of: Good Judgement

Our character curriculum is centred on building four key character traits discussed in relation to human flourishing and success since the times of Classical Greek Philosophy: resilience, self-control, good judgement and fairness. Why do we focus on these traits? This series, called “The importance of”, explores the importance of each of these four traits. Good […]

The Importance of: Resilience

Our character curriculum is centred on building four key character strengths discussed in relation to human flourishing and success since the times of Classical Greek Philosophy: resilience, self-control, good judgement and fairness. Why do we focus on these strengths? This series, called “The importance of”, explores the importance of each of these four topics. Being […]

Promoting resilience: The Growth Mindset

3 minute read One of the things we look at in the first term of our school projects is the Growth Mindset. This is a really important tool that develops resilience, and we want all of our young people and volunteers to know about it. We’ve loved talking about it, and wanted to share it […]

The quest for happiness

Citywise Founder Xavier Bosch kicks off our series of ‘foundations’ where we explore the fundamentals of what Citywise is all about. Where do we get our vision from? We’re in the business of helping the young, especially the disadvantaged, to grow in character. I started Citywise in Castlemilk, Glasgow over 20 years ago but cannot claim credit for doing […]