USAID/Positive Pathways/Democracy International, Jamaica partnered with the Village Initiatives Foundation (Jamaica) to implement Positive Deviance (PD) in a Jamaican community long stigmatized for such issues over nine months. This marks the first application of PD to youth violence prevention in the Caribbean region. Led by Dr. Khadijah Williams, Research Consultant and trained by Professor Arvind Singhal of the University of Texas, El Paso, the research team (comprising community researchers), embarked on a groundbreaking journey to “flip the script.”

Researchers tried to find out which conditions and circumstances in life stories of young people from marginalized Roma communities (MRC) are supportive and lead to success in formal education.

This is a story of a young man, who had been studding social work – master´s degree when I first met him. Currently he is director of a community centre in the Roma settlement, where he grew up. So, he has decided to stay and help Roma people from his community to overcome obstacles connected with formal education and other social problems.  

The Stanford d.school’s K12 Lab is focused on obliterating opportunity gaps in K-12 education by helping schools apply a design thinking approach to messy, complex, systemic problems that impact their students. When former d.school fellow Marc Chun was introduced to positive deviance and discovered a process intuitive and ripe for application across under-resourced K-12 schools struggling with systemic problems. The Positive Deviance for Educators project was born.

In this project, the stories of domestic violence and abuse in Moldova and Serbia from Geronto housewives and the elderly, respectively are highlighted by researchers in Belgrade.