Wellness TA (Spring 2025)

Project Background

Effective teamwork is a fundamental skill for tackling complex global challenges, yet many students and professionals struggle to collaborate productively. The forthcoming book, Learning to Team Up: Unleashing the Transformative Power of Collaboration in the Classroom, explores the mindsets and skillsets essential for successful team-based learning, particularly in higher education. It emphasizes reflective practice, psychological safety, belonging, and negotiation as critical elements of teamwork—principles that are equally vital in professional environments such as international development, where cross-disciplinary collaboration, problem-solving, and negotiation are key to driving sustainable impact.

Definition of Opportunity

This project invites a Notre Dame student team to create a series of short, engaging instructional videos that translate the book’s key lessons into accessible, practical, and easily implementable tools for educators and students. These videos will serve as learning resources to support more effective team-based learning in classrooms and professional settings.

A student team will develop high-quality, engaging video content that illustrates core concepts from the book, making them more accessible, actionable, and visually compelling. These instructional videos will support educators in implementing team-based learning strategies, reinforcing the book’s goal of equipping students with collaborative skills for both academic and professional success. The project will be supported by ND Studios and will include collaboration with Wellness TA for video production. Students will gain hands-on experience in educational content creation, storytelling, and media production, while contributing to a resource that enhances teamwork education globally.

Definition of Success

Success means gaining a clear understanding of the existing landscape, identifying what works and where gaps remain in available video content related to teamwork skills. It includes producing engaging, student-created instructional videos that bring the book’s themes to life—that ultimately will help equip instructors with practical tools and inspire them to implement its recommendations. Through this process, students will not only deepen their understanding of team-based learning but also enhance their storytelling and digital media skills, translating theory into real-world, impactful applications.

Meet the Team

Final Deliverables

Communications Plan on Reimagining Disability - L'Arche (Fall 2015)

Client Profile

L’Arche is an international non-governmental organization that works to provide support for people with intellectual disabilities so that they take their rightful place in our societies as active citizens. As an international organization, it seeks to promote diversity and solidarity across geographical and psychological borders. L’Arche is present in 147 communities in 35 countries around the world.

See all Development Advisory Team projects with L'Arche

Definition of Problem

Since the rise of ISIS, it has become terribly clear that web videos, as a form of mass communication, can be used as weapons of mass destruction. Yet web videos can also be used as tools of mass development.  Notwithstanding important progress in some parts of the world, people with intellectual disabilities live in the shadows of a persistent view—present in all cultures—that they are the undesirables. L’Arche has designed a project to leverage the power of film and the connectivity of social media to move the needle on the invisibility and humiliation of the intellectually disabled across the globe.  From September 6, 2015 to September 2016, L’Arche is launching a web series of 24 short documentaries running 3 - 5 minutes and shot in 12 different countries on 6 continents. The series seeks to reduce disability-related stigma and discrimination by correcting misperceptions about disability and positively changing the public discourse among viewers. 

Initial Steps and Options

• From a strategic point of view, how do you make this go viral, and how do you transform viewership into action? Create a plan for the distribution of L’Arche’s content (which platforms should be used and how) and advise L’Arche on how to make their content actionable.  Included in this plan should be an SEO strategy (Search Engine Optimization), which would require conducting keyword research on the subject of disability and L’Arche. Using Google trends and Google adwords, analyze what people are typing into search engines in the given countries and advise L’Arche on how to create content and build links so their content will be seen.
• Read extensively about the work of L’Arche and organizations interested in changing perceptions on people with intellectual disabilities. Look at social marketing campaigns to change perceptions and behaviors regarding issues such as smoking, obesity, etc. (Karen Gutierrez is teaching a fall 2015 one-credit course through the Eck Institute on social marketing and would be a good resource person.) 
• If you’re not familiar with SEO, these two online tutorials are free through OIT: “Fundamentals of SEO” http://www.lynda.com/Analytics-tutorials/SEO-Fundamentals/187858-2.html  “International SEO Fundamentals” http://www.lynda.com/Analytics-tutorials/International-SEO-Fundamentals/377449-2.html

Definition of Success

A strategic plan, with specific recommendations, that helps the series of L’Arche videos go viral and links them to a growing movement to change perceptions and reduce disability-related stigma and discrimination. 

Recommendation

Presentation

Slide Show

Report on Online Strategy

Report on Offline Strategy

Potential Key Words

From Aid to Accompaniment -Partners in Health (Fall 2014)

Client Profile

Partners in Health (PIH) was founded in 1987 to bring quality medical care to rural Haiti.  Since then, PIH has expanded to several countries around the world including Rwanda, Lesotho, Malawi, Russia, Peru, and Navajo Nation in the United States.  PIH also partners with several sister organizations to increase its ability to further its mission.  In 2012, PIH launched its newest project in the Chiapas region of Mexico.  PIH draws on the world’s best medical institutions to provide a preferential option for the poor in health care.  According to PIH’s mission statement, its mission is both medical and moral, and it is based on solidarity rather than charity alone.

See all Development Advisory Team projects with Partners in Health

Definition of Problem

One of PIH’s principal ideas is the approach to service, partnership, and engagement through accompaniment. The accompaniment approach to aid delivery is based on pragmatic solidarity with the poor. It proposes to build a different long-term relationship between that is traditional called “donor” and “recipient” and mandates walking side-by-side rather than leading. This model informs all the PIH does, including the way in which PIH uses funds to invest in the local community and meets the needs identified by local people. PIH believes that this idea—“from aid to accompaniment”—needs to become a much great part of the dialogue on international development, including the ways that an organization like PIH needs to “accompany” the public sector in the countries where it works. Although people inside and outside the organization often hear the term “accompaniment” many would have a hard time defining it and articulating how the principles impact the work of PIH. We hope to build awareness of this idea, and see how it can be integrated more fully into the training of PIH staff and friends, as well as serve as a training model for other interested organizations.

Initial Steps and Options

• Identify key principles of teaching of the concept “accompaniment” and how those concepts could most usefully be developed in an organizational context
• Working with the client, identify three to five non-profit or for-profit organizations that are particularly effective in training about key organizational concepts. Write short case studies that draw lessons from those experiences that would be useful to PIH as it is designing its own training programs.
• Promote awareness of this concept on a wider scale. How can PIH and other development organizations effectively engage people in a deeper understanding of the concept of accompaniment?

Definition of Success

It would be enormously helpful to have 1) an excellent set of three to five case studies of organizations particularly effective at training about key organizational concepts, and 2) outline (ideally with lesson plans) of a model for training new PIH staff members on the concept of accompaniment.

Recommendation

Presentation

Report

Development Advisory Team Biographies  

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From Aid to Accompaniment - Partners in Health (Fall 2013)

Client Profile

Partners in Health (PIH) is an NGO that was founded in 1987 in Boston. The organization originally developed as a community health project in Haiti, and since then has expanded with multiple other sites in Haiti as well as sites in a dozen other countries. The main goals of the organization are: providing health care and education to those most in need, working to alleviate the causes of disease, and sharing the ideas and lessons learned from experiences with other countries and NGOs. PIH also trains members of the community and partners with public health systems to involve local people in their initiatives.

See all Development Advisory Team projects with Partners in Health

Definition of Problem

One of PIH’s principal ideas is the approach to service through accompaniment. The accompaniment approach to aid delivery is based on pragmatic solidarity with the poor.  It proposes to build a different long-term relationship between partners and mandates walking side by side rather than leading.

This model informs all that PIH does, including the way in which PIH uses funds to invest in the local community and meets the needs identified by local people. PIH believes that this idea — “from aid to accompaniment” – needs to become a much great part of the dialogue on international development. We hope to build awareness of this idea, and see how it can be integrated into the work of other organizations.

Initial Steps and Options

• Identify key principles of the concept “aid to accompaniment”: How might aid be invested on the local level to improve public services, accompany governments, create jobs, and directly empower the people?
• Promote awareness of this concept on a wider scale.  How can other development organizations effectively be partners in promoting the idea of accompaniment? What are the most effective modalities to help build a “social movement” around this idea? What similar language/themes are used by other organization to convey similar concepts to accompaniment?
• Focus on particular opportunities related to Notre Dame, that include the publication of a book in the early fall 2013 by Orbis Press called In the Company of the Poor: Conversations with Dr. Paul Farmer and Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez, possibility of a conference on the topic, engagement of faculty and staff.

Recommendation