Blog

Chris Cocking and colleagues were commissioned to discover the views of young people in East Sussex towards the notion of resilience and how they thought schools and youth services could improve their implementation of resilience building mechanisms for young people.

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).

Bringing different people together, with different skills, interests, knowledge and experience is my day job. Often there are 2 or 3, sometimes a few more and all of them are interested in the same topic. A few weeks ago, I found myself in a room with 30 people: university students, academics, creative professionals, parents, community groups, young people, artists. Together we were looking at the Resilience Framework to see in what ways we could bring it to life.

After Ann Masten’s lecture we are more than ever convinced of the importance of campaigning for the next step in resilience research and practice, which explicitly addresses the political nature of poverty and discrimination and tries to tackle inequalities, that which is consistent with the Boingboing resilience approach.

Angie here again. Sunny morning in Halifax, Nova Scotia. You ever heard of Ann Masten? She’s mega famous in my world. I’m listening to her speak right now. She’s a US psychologist, working mostly on human development, and has just written a new book called Ordinary Magic. Ann’s been working on resilience for so long that she’s now won a lifetime award for it. Congratulations Ann.

Cindy Blackstock has just taken the Canadian government to court for injustices to aboriginal children. Cindy looks at the audience and tells us that her mentor gave her some advice which I just love – ‘don’t fall too much in love with your own organisation. And don’t fall in love with your own business card, as you might have to give them both up in the end to fight for your children.’