Unfortunately, when critical concepts gain broad acceptance are at risk of becoming diluted and losing their significance to marketing interests. Is resilience such a concept? Let’s hope not, as 2017 unfurls to feelings of both exuberance and anxiety in the country. In either case, opportunities to use that energy to build and sustain efforts to improve the health and well-being our communities abound. So, what does resilience look like?
Finding yourself in community with others who share your passions and concerns, rather than staying in bed with the covers pulled over your head is resilience.
Learning from your mistakes and then acting on what you’ve learned is resilience.
Believing in second chances is resilience.
Reaching out to support someone facing even greater hurdles than you are, instead of blaming them for your own challenges is resilience.
Coaction Institute has been working with grassroots Promotores de Salud in low-income Spanish-speaking communities in Marin County, California to understand how their communities and institutions can support their resilience as they serve out in the trenches:
Finding yourself in community with others who share your passions and concerns, rather than staying in bed with the covers pulled over your head is resilience.
Learning from your mistakes and then acting on what you’ve learned is resilience.
Believing in second chances is resilience.
Reaching out to support someone facing even greater hurdles than you are, instead of blaming them for your own challenges is resilience.
Coaction Institute has been working with grassroots Promotores de Salud in low-income Spanish-speaking communities in Marin County, California to understand how their communities and institutions can support their resilience as they serve out in the trenches:
- learning about secondary trauma and the factors that put them at particular risk and protect them from that on social, institutional and personal levels;
- fostering connectedness between the promotores and between them and the institutions that support their work;
- creating intentional spaces of mutual support within their teams;
- assessing and analyzing current levels of compassion satisfaction, work fatigue and secondary trauma within the teams;
- facilitating conversation between the promotores and their supervisors about how the institutions could better support them in preventing secondary trauma through policies and practices; and
- developing institutional and individual plans to prevent secondary trauma and reduce work fatigue among the promotores.