Previous Resilience Forums

Social and health inequalities go hand in hand: being poorer or coming from a disadvantaged background more generally is associated with inferior physical and mental health; durations of a healthy life and life expectancies are frequently considerably shorter.

This session was an interactive and experiential introduction, giving a felt sense of how a mindfulness practice may bring a wide range of benefits from increasing self-awareness, to gaining a greater sense of control where you can respond to rather than react to situations.

This Parental Engagement Project commissioned by East Sussex County Council in collaboration with 24 schools aimed to raise achievement for pupils in receipt of Free School Meals. The project was conducted through engagement with parents as parent researchers.

The first resilience forum in Hastings providing an introduction to the concept of resilience and highlighting relevant theory within the field, and most importantly considering how you can apply resilience within everyday life.

Ecotherapy can be located in a broad movement that has been growing over the past decades. This movement seeks to enlist the context and processes of the natural world in order to promote physical and psychological wellbeing, as well as recovery from physical and mental ill health.

Resilience is a highly valued in modern societies, but where does it come from? What role does policy play, and how do inequalities influence whether children grow up to be resilient? These questions will be explored and a set of online educational materials will be introduced.

The audience heard from inspiring children, young people and practitioners about how they apply resilience ideas to help with challenging situations, practical approaches to resilience building for children and families, and how community members and local organisations can join forces with university academics.

Moulsecoomb Primary School feel wellbeing and resilience are closely connected to that of the family as a whole. Our programme of support and engagement focuses on creating an environment of respect, care and opportunities for families to take an active role and feel their voices are important in the school.

This research related the academic concepts of resilience to practice experience, with the hope of strengthening student and practitioner alertness to the complex matrix of factors that can contribute to resilience, and to strengthen arguments for sites of resilience development, such as professional supervision.

Policies and programmes reflect competing social values rather than issues of risk and resilience per se, such that the outcomes used to assess risk and resilience in one context may represent only those characteristics that serve that context.

The relevance of resilience to working with children and young people is well established. In recent years the notion of ‘practitioner resilience’ has also been established in the literature, widening the application of resilience theory to those working in various fields of professional practice.

The European Resilience project explores how to help adults and adolescents through resilience training, using a three-part toolkit including Guidelines, 10 exercises and an interview schema developed to fit into adult education and counselling.

FRIENDS for Life is an evidence based programme that teaches children and young people techniques to cope with anxiety and promotes resilience and well-being. It uses a cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) framework incorporating attachment, mindfulness and health behaviours in school-based groups.

Using artwork, film and photography the group will explore how the resilience components of the Resilience Framework relate to visual arts and how they can be used in the everyday lives of young people and the young at heart.

To reframe resilience as a social practice means we attend to the elements comprising practices as elements form a bridge between practices-as-performances (meanings, materials and competencies) and practices-as-entities (constituted through integrations).

Resilience is the ability to withstand and recover from stressful life challenges, becoming strengthened and more resourceful. It’s a concept and source of knowledge that the Insiders’ Guide Parent-Carer Support Course translates into practical things that parent carers need to make happen to improve the odds for children and families managing tough times.

Resilience can both contribute to, and be developed within, positive peer relationships. Research studies link parent-child interactions, peer play patterns, school climate and learning, exclusion and disaffection, and even the contemporary consumer culture value system that surrounds us all.

Experiential resilience is experienced as developing a meaningful sense, in light of perceived challenge, of space-related essential feelings of dwelling, refuge, playground and path.

Building the resilient school from the ground up generated new insights amongst teaching staff and allowed the school to try out interventions to see which were successful. As the programme developed the school began to assess pupils for attachment to the school and looked at strengths and difficulties.

Double session: ‘Building resilience alongside vulnerable young people in a technological age’ & ‘Working with teachers, parents, and children with complex backgrounds in Greece: a resilience, ecosystemic, and psychodynamically oriented partnership model’.

Promoting resilience within, and through, the student:supervisor relationship may reduce levels of work related stress. Supervisors provide a ‘holding environment’, but constraints are often cited in the literature such as: lack of time, conflicting demands, workload issues and inadequate preparation that challenge this supportive role.

In an age where binge drinking is rife amongst teenagers, not to mention self-harm, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy and poor sexual health, what is happening in our society and culture in terms of this notion of peer pressure which is hindering good peer support and healthy relationships?

In this research study participants of a boxercise class facilitated by a local Mind association explained how boxercise helped them to develop resilience and better psychological health.

We have summarised and critiqued the academic literature on school-based resilience approaches for young people aged 12 and up. The aim was to explain how and why these approaches do (or do not) work in particular contexts, and to present the results in a way that answered parents’ and practitioners’ most commonly asked questions.

An extensive review of resilience found some of the most important characteristics of resilience. An overview of the central characteristics may be a foundation for generating alternative ways of adjusting to the challenges of hardship.

A new national workplace resilience programme developed by The Resilience Space and the TUC aims to build resilience in workplaces. The session will look at what a trade union approach to resilience might look like and the important links between trade union education methods and resilience.

Sam and Claudia present their experiences of ‘collective resilience’, having successfully campaigned to make ‘stalking’ a separate law. They will look at the commonality of their own experiences, extreme fear, in some cases devastating loss. This sense of unity can also include understanding the profile of stalking perpetrators, whether they be ex-intimate partner or stranger stalkers.

Learners have an ‘acute need for positive mentoring’ and the quality of mentoring in early clinical experience can be a ‘make or break’ issue. SCPHN students enter the practice arena under the guidance and supervision of an experienced practitioner, known as a Practice Teacher .

This research challenges some common discourses on risk. It also contributes to theory building in relation to understanding protective processes, mechanisms, chain reactions and turning points which support the young men’s pathways to resilience, and resilience to reoffending.

Kris Fernandes and Sarah Wilkins presented some theories and current thinking around strength-based child protection models of practice. Kris discussed how a particular model is used within a community health trust and Sarah talked about her recent work with foster carers locally using the Resilience Therapy framework.

The In-Patient High Dependency Unit at Ticehurst Hospital works with young adolescents who have been through other psychiatric services but still remain with substantial problems. They usually attract a number of diagnoses and their difficulties have proved largely resistant to conventional treatment methods.

We know that having a view to the future, the ability to reflect on your life situation and negotiate services and support at times of trouble, helps to build resilience. Mentoring is frequently considered an effective route to launching these capabilities with children and young people. Can it be that simple?

Is panic a useful description of human behaviour during mass emergencies, or should we instead focus on the remarkable resilience that people and communities can show in the face of threat and adversity?

WARM is a new tool to help communities understand their underlying needs and capacities. It brings together a wide range of indicators to measure wellbeing (how people feel about themselves and their communities) and resilience (the capacity of people and communities to bounce back after shock or in the face of adversity).

How we might use resilience and strengths-based research for learning and teaching about health and social inequalities and how we might develop this together, between the University and Community?

An overview of the concept of resilience as incorporated into a framework for practice in child welfare and protection. Ways in which practitioners are already applying the concept in practice will be explored, drawing on research into the operationalisation of resilience.

Does resilience change the way we think about inequalities and the struggle for social justice? Or should inequalities change the way we think about resilience? What does it mean to work in a way that recognises the strength of the evidence on the wider determinants of mental wellbeing?

Jamie introduced some core models of hoping, and argued that certain types of hope may obscure our sense of agency in meeting life’s challenges. The aim of this was to promote discussion of personal experiences of hoping.

This session offered the chance to discuss a few resilience articles to get us in the mood for the Resilience – Why bother? Conference we hosted in Brighton in April 2011, including the work of Michael Ungar, our conference keynote speaker.

Our fourth Resilience Forum heard from Paul Hoggett and Yvon Guest from the University of the West of England, who opened up some of the small and large politics of resilience in the UK at the present time.