Category: Blog

Q: What do you get when you put academics, designers, young people, practitioners, students, trainers, parents, digital geniuses, cups of tea and biscuits all in one room?
A: Read on!!

Angie reporting from the basement of a hotel in Málaga whilst the sun is shining outside. I’m at a mental health conference organised by the European Network for Mental Health Service Evaluation – ENMESH 2015. The conference is teeming with medical researcher types and psychologists. Granted they are hard workers.

I began to understand the power of Imagine that first day – how projects in Rotherham and Huddersfield were helping restore community practice and relations, in two towns whose souls had been blighted in recent years through xenophobia. Imagine seeks to connect universities and their local communities through collaborative research. It completely ushers away the traditional notion of the haughty ivory tower doing research on others.

I was inspired by the Resilience Tree as a metaphor for resilience. I was also hooked into the idea of how a tree, leaves and fruit could be utilised as a communication tool for describing resilience and a method for gaining insights from people about their own resilience, resilient practice, resilience of others and what they might do differently given the opportunity.

The Blackpool model helps people think through how to work individually with a child, through their family, at school and in the community to enhance resilience. They have turned this into a planning tool to ask what they are doing with individual pupils, targeted pupils, and universal (all).