Oral Presentation 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

Transformative, Necessary, And Countercultural: Activating Character Strengths In Schools, Organizations And Communities (#101)

Jillian Coppley Darwish 1
  1. Mayerson Academy, Cincinnati, OH, United States

Our world is challenging.   It can be easy to feel daunted by all we face on a daily basis.  The good news is that we have everything we need to improve our own lives and our collective future. By activating our character strengths, we not only change our personal engagement, performance, and well-being, we increase the positive potential for our human condition.  

Our strengths-based work in nearly 100 schools, 30 organizations and an entire neighborhood has verified a research-based process for developing the inspiration and capacity to realize our most positive visions.

Research on our three-step model, which involves knowing, seeing and applying strengths, has demonstrated increases in engagement, performance, learning, well-being and connectedness.  Each context and engagement is unique but commonalities have emerged in terms of critical success factors for all three areas.    

Knowing these factors as well as the countervailing forces and the obstacles that stand in our way is essential if we are to implement a strengths-based approach to catalyzing the best in ourselves and our world.