ECOS NEWS
Last week, ECOS Institute hosted its first fireside chat — a new format designed to move beyond traditional webinar presentations and create space for more open, reflective conversations about early childhood, crisis, and systems change.
The discussion brought together Gabriella Brent, CEO of the Amna Refugee Healing Network, and Professor Mark Tomlinson, clinical psychologist, Co-Director of the Institute for Life Course Health Research at Stellenbosch University, and Professor of Maternal and Child Health at Queen’s University Belfast. Together, they brought decades of experience spanning early childhood development, mental health, displacement, trauma, community healing, and systems change.
The messy complexity of supporting children in crisis
The conversation began with reflections on both speakers’ personal and professional journeys, offering insight into the perspectives shaping their work. From there, the discussion moved into the complexity of supporting young children and families living through crisis.
Both speakers highlighted a difficult reality: systems are fragmented, professionals are overstretched, and communities are carrying immense pressure. Too often, responses focus on programmes, outputs, and technical coordination while losing sight of the people living through these realities every day.
Mark captured this succinctly: “We have to change the system because we’re not meeting the needs of people in crisis.”
“Everything is about relationship”
At the heart of the conversation was the importance of human connection, especially in times of instability and trauma.
Gabriella emphasised that relationships matter at every level: between children and caregivers, communities and institutions, practitioners and families, researchers and local actors. Support cannot be separated from human connection.
Children do not experience their lives in neatly divided sectors, and families do not experience grief, violence, fear, displacement, or instability in isolated categories. Yet systems often respond as though they do.
Both speakers reflected on how much of the sector’s language — terms like “multi-sectoral coordination,” for example — can feel disconnected from what people are actually carrying. What communities often need instead is accompaniment: support that meets people where they are, builds on spaces and relationships that already exist, and creates environments where people feel welcomed rather than managed.
“How do we keep the human element alive in these contexts and not over-clinicalise?” Gabriella asked.
Inner safety, healing, and community
The discussion also explored what it means for children and families in crisis to regain a sense of inner safety when fear, grief, stress, and uncertainty have become part of daily life.
Gabriella spoke about the importance of creating spaces where people feel emotionally safe enough to connect, grieve, express themselves, and experience moments of restoration. She described joy, creativity, spirituality, solidarity, celebration, and collective expression as essential parts of healing and survival — especially for communities living through prolonged violence and displacement.
“There’s wisdom in different ways of being together,” she said.
Both speakers stressed that broader struggles for dignity and justice are not abstract concepts for people experiencing crisis. They shape wellbeing at the deepest level, affecting emotional health, nervous system regulation, and people’s ability to feel safe in the world. Spaces where people’s humanity is witnessed and validated can make a profound difference, particularly in contexts where systems continuously produce instability and exhaustion, and many communities and individuals experience daily dehumanisation.
Partnership, power, and politics
The conversation also challenged top-down approaches to humanitarian and development work, where outside experts arrive with ready-made solutions.
Instead, both speakers emphasised the importance of genuine partnership across communities, researchers, practitioners, institutions, and policymakers.
“People and communities are the experts of themselves,” Gabriella said.
Listening, co-creation, and shared decision-making were recurring themes throughout the discussion. Both speakers emphasized that younger generations, need to be included in decisions shaping their futures. Systems cannot continue to be designed from above and imposed on communities already living with the consequences of past failures.
Questions from participants pushed the conversation further, raising issues of conflict, structural violence, and whether humanitarian and education systems are helping children merely adapt to suffering rather than changing the conditions causing it.
Neither speaker avoided the political dimensions of the work. “Everything is political,” Mark said. Gabriella said that, listening to children, accompanying communities, witnessing suffering, and refusing denial are all political acts in contexts where systems are failing people.
Scaling relational work in systems built for speed
As the conversation drew to a close, attention turned to one of the field’s biggest tensions: how to scale relational, community-based work within systems driven by urgency, measurable outcomes, and rapid results.
Both Gabriella and Mark spoke candidly about how relational work often clashes with the realities of funding and institutional pressures. Trust takes time. Community work is rarely linear. Different communities require different forms of support. And relational depth can easily disappear when organisations focus too heavily on numbers, replication, and scale.
Mark challenged researchers and funders to become more honest about the complexity of the work rather than searching for overly simplified solutions. “We need to convince funders that it’s messy,” he said. “It takes a lot longer.” To this, Gabriella added that one size fits all approaches are not a solution for everyone. She referenced increasing research showing the different ways people heal and require access to different kinds of mental health and community care.
Gabriella recognised that there have been some wins. Funders increasingly recognise how essential wellbeing is for the safety and success of interventions and are increasingly funding this. She also highlighted that relational depth can be protected within scale, and there are a number of organisations that are advancing this and funders supporting it. Nevertheless, more understanding, respect and protection of what this work takes with communities experiencing multiple, intersecting and intergenerational adversity is needed. As violence, displacement, and crisis continue to grow globally, so too does the pressure placed on caregivers, practitioners, and communities themselves.
Staying with the complexity
Throughout the conversation, Gabriella and Mark returned to the importance of staying with the messiness of the work rather than searching for neat frameworks or easy answers. This is particularly necessary and important when working with communities experiencing multiple, intersectional, and intergenerational harm. It is essential to be aware that working with conflict impacted communities is not the same as addressing or treating depression in a stable community and interventions and funders should be clear about this.
Supporting children in crisis cannot be reduced to delivering programmes alone. It requires relationships, trust, creativity, partnership, and systems capable of treating people as human beings rather than problems to process.
And perhaps most importantly, it requires accepting that this work will always be complex, relational, political, and deeply human.
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