6 days ago
2
WHEN HURRICANE Melissa tore across Jamaica, it left more than physical destruction in its wake. It unsettled something deeper – our sense of safety, our emotional rhythm, and our memory of what normal feels like. For many, the storm passed. However, the paralysis from the destruction still lingers.
NexxStepp Training and Social Impact Consulting Limited has stepped forward with an approach that looks nothing like traditional charity, volunteerism, or emergency response. It carries a sharper intelligence, a deeper emotional awareness, and a more strategic understanding of how nations actually heal.
At the heart of this approach is the Bounce Forward Collective, a people-powered movement launched by NexxStepp to transform relief into resilience, overwhelm into clarity, and community fatigue into collective stabilisation.
“The new face of social impact is not about handouts. It is about building the emotional, cognitive, and community architecture that helps people recover with dignity. Emotional regulation is part of national infrastructure. Community intelligence is part of national security,” said Tishauna Mullings, social development practitioner and chief social innovator at NexxStepp Lifelong Educational Services.
“It is an audacious philosophy, and one that Jamaica has begun to embrace. The Bounce Forward model stands on a different foundation than Jamaica’s historical disaster responses,” Mullings said.
Instead of reacting to crises with charity alone, NexxStepp has designed responses based on:
• Emotional engineering – stabilising the nervous system
• Cognitive rebooting – helping people move from shock to strategy
• Micro-restoration – solving small problems with big ripple effects
• Impact minimalism – doing the smallest effective action with the largest national return
• Community intelligence – letting local knowledge drive interventions
• Dignity-forward recovery – support that strengthens, not embarrasses
• Strategic mission trips – deployments rooted in assessment, emotional-first aid, and micro-project activation
“This is not a programme. It is an entire architecture of social impact – structured, psychological, culturally intelligent, and deeply Jamaican. We don’t show up with noise. We show up with strategy,” Mullings said.
The Bounce Forward Collective has already reached thousands. Over 2,850 Jamaicans directly supported through emotional-regulation sessions, resilience training, and targeted relief; over 100,000 reached nationally and globally through public education on trauma, disaster psychology, and recovery.
Over 450 households have been stabilised with care packages prioritising dignity for the elderly, pregnant mothers, and persons with disabilities, while over 1,500 individuals have been supported in National Therapy sessions, exploring survivor guilt, anxiety, sleep disruption, breathwork, youth resilience, and the return of cognitive clarity.
While the Bounce Forward Collective spans multiple interventions, week three of National Therapy offered a powerful snapshot of this new era. The session featured Christopher ‘Johnny’ Daley who weaved humour into emotional recalibration; Rochelle James who translated emotional overload into workforce strategy; and Dr Paul Smith, who grounded the discussion with clinical clarity.
“This mix of psychology, leadership, and comedy was not accidental. It was a statement healing must be multidisciplinary and culturally relevant.
The Bounce Forward philosophy is a living curriculum, flexible, generative, and designed to meet Jamaica where it hurts,” Mullings said.
The Bounce Forward Collective is helping Jamaica rise with a new kind of maturity, one that understands resilience not as toughness, but as regulated nervous systems, informed communities, and people who feel supported, not judged.
“Jamaica is not just bouncing back, we are bouncing forward, into clarity, community power, emotional wisdom, and national coordination at a level we’ve never had before. We recover by rebuilding each other. That is the future of social impact. And Jamaica is already walking toward it,” Mullings said.
English (US) ·