Resilience – An Organizing Theme for Matters that Matter

1. Resilience – An Organizing Theme for Matters that Matter Prepared by: Leah Levac, PhD Student, IDST, University of New Brunswick Canadian Public Health Association June 1-4, 2008

2. Presentation Overview • Why an Organizing Theme? • Some Perspectives on Resilience • Community Context • Health Context • Youth Context • Important Common Features of Resilience • Generators and Disablers of Youth Resilience • Why Resilience as an Organizing Theme? • Resilience in Atlantic Youth Program Research • What’s Next?

3. Why an Organizing Theme? • To guide research, policy, and practice towards complementary ends (e.g., How does this contribute to building resilience in the system?) • To respond concurrently to social, economic, and ecological injustices (Dwyer, 2005; Middleton, 2003) • To call injustice (e.g., child poverty, homelessness, unsustainable consumption patterns) to attention and task • Because a ‘disorganizing theme’ seems like a bad idea…

4. Resilience: Community Context

5. Resilience: Health Context

6. Resilience: Youth Context

7. Common Features of Resilience • Understood as a concept (noun) and a state of being (adjective) • Encompasses fixed (e.g., energy self-sufficiency, personal agency) and interactive (e.g., participatory decision-making, school development) elements • Can be created and destroyed • Implies high degree of interconnection and collaboration within and between communities of people and systems

8. Generators individual characteristics (self-esteem, attitude, temperament) supportive environments health intentional efforts complementary resilience youth engagement (civic and otherwise) participatory decision-making Disablers poverty/low-income and related outcomes illiteracy risk behaviours environmental degradation youth incarceration w/o rehabilitation lack of mental health services family instability low self-esteem Youth Resilience

9. Why Resilience as an Organizing Theme? • Demands dialogue and collaboration • Suited to complexity and interdisciplinarity • Promotes a systems approach (interaction between agent, environment, and structure) • Speaks concurrently to social, ecological, and economic concerns • Encompasses adaptability and resistance

10. Resilience in Atlantic Canadian Youth Program Research • Rapid review to identify programs in Atlantic Canada that claim to build resilience, are targeted at adolescents, and have a presence on the internet • Search included: • Google • ERIC • Sociological Abstracts • Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition • Canadian Business and Current Affairs – Education • Wildlife and Ecology Studies Worldwide • PsychINFO

11. Table 1: Search Strategy for Identifying Atlantic Canadian Youth Resilience Building Programs

12. Table 1 (cont’d): Search Strategy for Identifying Atlantic Canadian Youth Resilience Building Programs

13. Resilience in Atlantic Canadian Youth Program Research • No articles dealing specifically with programs that aimed to enhance youth resilience in Atlantic Canada, either by means of explaining or evaluating their presence or effects • Reinforces the absence of an organizing theme and common language • Provides an opportunity to consider limitations to the search strategy (problematic proxy) • Perhaps: • Shortage of youth programs in Atlantic Canada in general • Notion of ‘program’ defies concept of resilience slightly • Resilience ‘informs’ but is not a stated goal • Absence signals an evaluation failure

14. What’s Next? • Towards Resilience as an Organizing Theme • Who needs to be involved? • What will success look like? • What’s the most appropriate scale? • Why now? • Areas for Future Research and Thought • Thorough systematic review of Canadian research and programs that further the practice of resilience • Research on the interaction between the natural cycles of resilience in humans and cycles of resilience in institutions and society (questions of time and scale) • Indicators of resilience in healthy public policy • Resilience and gender • Bibliography Available

15. Thank You Questions or Comments? Leah Levac Leah.Levac@unb.ca (506) 458-0017

16. Extra stuff • Provincial child poverty (after-tax LICO) rate* = 9%; Social assistance rate for single mother with one child = $739/month; # of youth (0-17 yrs) remanded* = 275; # of youth (0-17 yrs) admissions to custody* = 267; # of youth (0-18 yrs) in provincial guardianship** = 787 ; % of youth (2-17 yrs) overweight or obese* = 34%; Adult illiteracy rate = 57%; Alcohol and Cannabis use (gr. 7,9,10,12)*** = 50% and 25%; Ecstasy and Cocaine use (gr. 7,9,10,12)*** = 4.4% and 2.5%; Also: environmental degradation, inequality, homelessness, lack of self-esteem, absence of developmental assets • 2004 figures from Statistics Canada; ** 2006/2007 figures from New Brunswick Department of Social Development; *** 2007 New Brunswick Student Drug Use Survey • Youth Statistics for NB • Total Population = 751,000 • Youth Pop = 15% (115,500) • FN Youth Pop = 25% (4,400) • Families w/o Children = 91,000 • 2 Parent Families w/ Children = 93,000 • 1 Parent Families w/ Children (82% female) = 35,000 • K-2;3;4;5;6 – French Schools – 23; English Schools – 105 • K-8 – French – 46; English – 34 • K-12 – French – 5; English – 8 • 5-8; 6-8 – French – 6; English – 32 • 6-12 – French – 2; English – 12 • 9-12 – French – 13; English – 30

17. Need (for focus on resilience as organizing theme) emphasized not only by the gap in program availability as highlighted by this rapid review, but also by the conditions we have created for our young people that have resulted in child poverty, poor rates of literacy, and high rates of obesity, among other disablers of resilience