Category: Blog

Recently, a crack team of Boingboingers answered a call from our fearless founder, Angie Hart. Our mission, which we accepted, was to promote Boingboing’s resilience tools at the Utopia Fair 2016 by staffing our own Resilience Tools stall. The tools have all been co-produced with young people facing additional barriers to resilience as part of the Designing Resilience Project.

Sam Hart shared her knowledge and understanding of trauma and incarcerated individuals, based on her experiences and trip to the USA through the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship. Her scholarship focus was families of incarcerated individuals through a “trauma informed lens”.

Dr Hayley Walker-Williams and Professor Anise Fouché from the North West University, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa, presented the Survivor to Thriver strengths-based group intervention promoting resilience & enabling posttraumatic growth in women who experienced childhood sexual abuse in South Africa.

So there I was: slightly disoriented, a little sweaty, surrounded by thousands of other young people. All of us were listening to a performance of Lukas Graham’s ‘7 Years’. I know what you’re thinking, and the answer is no. I wasn’t at a concert or in a stuffy nightclub somewhere in London. Instead, I was in Strasbourg, France, enjoying the opening ceremony of the European Youth Event (EYE) 2016.

After many years of hanging around with academics I have learnt that ‘community partners’ is code in the international university world for ‘organisations and people who are NOT quite as important as us’. In my head I have often added my own secret addition ‘but are actually doing real things with real people’. This is why I like working with the Boingboing community and CUPP.