The Prevention Work Happening Half a World Away Should Change How You Think About Your Work Here
A girl in Kerala, India, sat in a school session and heard for the first time in her life that she mattered. Not from a counselor. Not from a parent. From a young woman about her age who was trained as a prevention educator. That one moment -- someone looking at you and saying "you are important, you are relevant, you are unique" -- is why this episode stopped me.
I had the chance to partner with Shane Varceo and the Dalgarno Institute's Unnecessary Harm podcast for a multicast episode focused on World Resiliency Week 2026. We brought in two of the campaign's architects: Adam Woods, national coordinator of the Hope Tour in Australia, and Sneha Patiyathal, a credentialed catalyst at the Fourth Wave Foundation in Kerala, India. Two different countries. Two completely different cultural contexts. The same story running underneath both of them.
That story is this: Young people everywhere are reaching for substances not because substances feel good, but because something else feels empty. Identity. Significance. Worth. Belonging. The human condition doesn't change across borders. What changes is the delivery mechanism of the pain. In Kerala, it might be social media and movies that glamorize alcohol and make it look like the path to being cool. In Bunbury, Western Australia, it might be fathers who are absent for two-week mining shifts -- there but not there, present but not present. In both places, kids are handed something that says "this will make you feel better" before anyone has offered them something real.
"Encouragement is oxygen for the soul. When your soul has no oxygen, it can't breathe -- and it looks for anything to give it that breath." -- Shane Varkow, quoting John C. Maxwell
The prevention field spends a lot of time on the what. What substances. What risk factors. What programs. This conversation names the why. And when you hear Sneha describe focusing on the 75% of students who aren't using substances but are vulnerable -- the fence sitters who could go either way -- you realize that's where prevention has always needed to live. Not in the crisis. In the conditions that precede it.
It's also where you hear stories that remind you why this work matters. The Venda Cup -- Fourth Wave Foundation's annual football tournament in Kerala -- started with four teams in 2017. Last year: 61 boys' teams, 61 girls' teams. This year: 800 boys and 800 girls, across all 14 districts of Kerala. Two of those players went to the Slum Soccer World Cup in the UK in 2019 and won. Not because they were the best athletes. Because someone gave them a pair of boots, a place to play, and an identity that had nothing to do with substances.
The Pulse of Resilience: Fall, Feel, Rise is the theme for World Resiliency Week 2026, and there is something powerful in the order of those three words. It does not say "fall and rise." It says fall, then feel, then rise. Because what happens between the fall and the rise is where prevention actually lives.
Listen to the full conversation and hear why this work -- happening in India and Australia and in your community -- is all part of the same thing.
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