What is the Resilience Project?

How does resilience apply to individuals, populations and communities? What does it look like? Can exploring how to build resilience be a biological, psychological, sociological and economic engine?

The Resilience Project combines the collective strengths of the education community in northeastern Pennsylvania to explore the question: “Can NEPA become a community of resilience?”

Resilience as Public Health event schedule

8 – 8:30 a.m. 
Continental breakfast  

8:30 – 8:45 a.m. 
Welcome and introduction
Leighton Huey, MD
Associate Dean for Behavioral Health Integration and Community Care Transformation, Geisinger College of Health Sciences

8:45 – 10:15 a.m.
“Nurturing Community Resilience: Systemic Thinking for Everyday and Uncommon Challenges”
Michael Ungar, PhD

When working with people who experience the multiple challenges of addictions, mental health problems and social marginalization (e.g., poverty, family violence, racism and other factors), mental health, public health and social services can have a greater influence when they focus less on problems and more on the factors that promote resilience. In this talk, Dr. Michael Ungar will show that resilience is a process that is nurtured by service providers who match their interventions to their client’s needs, negotiating to make services both available and accessible in ways that people experience as culturally and contextually relevant. Dr. Ungar will present a multisystemic, resilience-enabling approach to service design and delivery that makes services strengths-focused and resistance-proof, drawing on the capacity of people’s friends, family and community as potential sources of support. Participants will learn how to identify and encourage twelve factors associated with resilience such as: supportive relationships; a powerful identity; a sense of personal control, agency and power; social justice and fair treatment; belonging, purpose and spirituality; and cultural rootedness. Dr. Ungar will share both his research and stories from his clinical practice that illustrate what effective, multisystemic services can look like.

CEUs will be available for physicians, physician assistants, pharmacists, nurses, social workers and psychologists. Learners can claim attendance by entering the SMS code in the Confirmation Form page or by texting the code to 570-605-4723. The SMS code is found on the home page of this SESSION.

10:15 – 10:30 a.m.
Break

10:30 a.m. – Noon
Roundtable discussion
“Sharing Stories of Successfully Building the Resilience of People and their Communities"

A focus on resilience helps us to understand individual adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies, as well as the social and physical ecologies that facilitate processes associated with resilience. Participants in these roundtable discussions will have the opportunity to discuss individuals in their clinical and community practice and to share successful strategies that they’ve used to build individual and community well-being.