Resilience Skills Archives - Page 5 of 7

Cultivation Cycle checklists

For gardens and farms, every stage of the cultivation cycle and all four seasons are important. This holds true for people’s work and life generally, but we often over-focus on some stages of the cycle, and neglect others. This quick checklist will help you see how you can use these cycles better. In gardens, farms … Read more

Composting: the upsides of your downsides

Imagine that you can tap into a major new source of energy and insight, that’s already within you: it’s free, abundant, and just needs a bit of effort to process it. What’s more, you’ll be creating benefits out of problems that drain energy and pollute your inner ecosystem. This is what composting offers you. … Read more

What is Post-Traumatic Growth? By Miriam Akhtar

The title may sound heavy-duty, but this excellent short book should be relevant for a lot of people. Miriam’s list of what can cause trauma is very inclusive, and her book is an easily accessible introduction to a range of wellbeing and resilience methods. The whole book is only 140 pages, with five chapters. It … Read more

RESILIENZ (German) and RESILIENCE (English) – where´s the difference?

Guest Blog by Daniel Körner of Wisdom Tree Recently, my attention was drawn to the topic of resilience and how this concept has been taken up differently in the two cultures where I live, the UK and Germany/Austria. Typing ‘resilience’ into google UK, many initial results lead to news from the banking sector, official governmental … Read more

Learning from our Future Fears

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley I decided to re-read this book because several futures experts see it as a perceptive view of where our world is headed. Having read it, I can recommend the book as superbly written, and full of provoking insights. Brave New World is often bracketed with George Orwell’s 1984. Both books were … Read more

How to stay afloat in the sea of Technology

Practical ways to avoid total immersion Technology is clearly a vast subject: we’re all being affected by many different technologies, without being aware of them. What’s really alarming is that the motive behind most of the rapid change affecting us is simply profit, and the regulatory frameworks which should steer these changes, and make them … Read more

Front-line extreme: natural resilience for junior hospital doctors

Of all the front-line services we depend on, hospitals are among the most crucial, and a large hospital will have several hundred junior doctors. These are young men and women, from mid-twenties into thirties. They start right out of university, and the first two years are the Foundation phase. An amazing 30% of junior doctors … Read more

Dreams against Despair: Thomas Berry and the power of myth

Dreams, in the sense of inspiring visions, and myths, in the sense of powerful beliefs, have a huge influence on our world. Think of Mandela and Gandhi: two lone figures whose dreams overturned a myth which upheld a powerful Establishment. Deep down, I feel a lot of pain and despair for the state of our … Read more

Dare to Imagine – delving into super-resilience

In October 2017 I co-led a weekend at Hazel Hill Wood called Dare to Imagine: Growing into the Future – exploring super-resilience with Nature’s help. When we gathered round a campfire on the Friday evening, I described this as a quest: a shared search for something valuable and elusive. It was certainly a fruitful adventure. The first … Read more

Book Review: Active Hope by Macy and Johnstone

An excellent guide to personal resilience I have taken part in workshops led by both Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, and regard them as two of the best teachers on personal resilience in a full sense of the phrase. Working in depth with this book could be a good start to exploring super-resilience. This book … Read more

Current Events

Men’s Elderhood Retreat | May 10-12

Our venue: Trwyn Tal in the Llanthony Valley, Wales A men’s peer group This weekend offers a shared space to explore as a peer group how we harvest the fruits, enjoy the blessings and adjust to the downsides of getting older: a chance to look afresh and consider the future we’d like to help create. How can we serve as elders in these troubled times, and be good ancestors to those who come after us? What’s the balance, in later life, between inner contemplation and outer action? This retreat is intended as a supportive circle for questions like these, or whatever we choose as a group. Dates: May 10-12 Location: Llanthony Valley, Black Mountains, Wales Bookings: For more info or bookings, please contact Simon Chinnery: .

Featured Blog

How can we raise community resilience?

The Facing the 2020s report As the pressures on all of us keep rising, we can see mounting discord about best priorities and solutions. One of the few topics on which almost everyone agrees is that increasing the resilience of local communities is getting ever more vital. This has been a focus of my work since 2012, so I’m offering an overview of some of my insights. As part of a project called Facing the 2020s, in 2012 I commissioned a substantial piece of action research on UK community resilience by Reos Partners, which included over thirty diagnostic interviews, extensive desk research, and exploratory workshops in London, Edinburgh and Cardiff with potential stakeholders, including national and local government, NGOs and community organisations. This blog is a summary of the insights I gained from this research. The terms community and resilience are so heavily used that a short explanation of what I mean by community resilience may be wise: the collective capacity of a group of people to handle and grow through crises and challenges. I’ve set out below some of the main aspects of resilience in this context: part of this capacity could come from organisations, including local authority, public services and non-profit groups. Material: some capacity to respond locally to interruptions in food, energy supplies, especially for elderly and vulnerable people. Environmental: response to ecosystem damage, eg habitat loss, pollution and to extreme weather, eg floods, droughts.Wellbeing: for everyone’s emotional needs, especially those who have mental health or isolation issues.Inspirational: maintaining and renewing a sense of vision, cohesion and purpose in the community in the face of a crisis.Connective: good communication within the group, including the skills of hearing, voicing, reconciling strong differences in opinions and values. The main insights from the Facing the 2020s research are these: Reproducibility: On most aspects of community resilience, there are successful exemplar projects somewhere in the UK. For a concise, inspiring range of examples, see the book The New Road, by Alf and Ewan Young. Why have these not been widely reproduced? One reason is that many good community resilience initiatives have depended on a few superhuman people, who just kept going against impossible difficulties. How can such interventions be systematised so that regular humans could implement them in a bigger number of communities? Recording what was done in an accessible toolkit form would help a lot. Sustainable funding: Many good initiatives have also depended on funding that was not reproducible, e.g. a slab of one-off grant funding as part of a pilot programme by an NGO. Sustainable funding sources could include raising capital from local communities themselves, (eg crowdfunding), or a social enterprise model, or a couple of larger foundations offering a grant scheme plus support to use it. Professional services: Many community initiatives struggle to find professional support geared to their particular needs, in finance, legal, property, HR and other areas. The emergence of specialists for this sector would greatly assist reproductivity. Systemic catalysts: In my dream of raising UK community resilience, a focal role would be played by trained advocate-facilitators, who would go into a community to understand its needs and dynamics, help gather support and a project team and could provide access to reproducible role models, sustainable funding, professional services and more. Working with minority groups and communities of identity: Some communities will be more vulnerable to shocks than others, and history tells us that unresolved social tensions bubble up at times of stress. Resilient societies and communities rely heavily on social cohesion. The benefits of working on community resilience now include the opportunity to pre-empt more severe ruptures to social cohesion which are likely to arise from the major stresses ahead. It is important to involve minority communities in the resilience journey, and communities of identity such as LGBT, instead of focussing solely on geographic communities. Wider participation: Many places don’t have a strong sense of community, and in most of those that do, only a tiny percentage of people participate actively in community matters. How could larger numbers of communities, and larger numbers of people, have a motivation to participate in community resilience, including ethnic and low-income communities? This is a crucial issue, which will become more acute amid the pressures ahead: it would be great to see a couple of enlightened large NGOs fund pilot projects and gathering of best practice to move this forward. Engaging local authorities: As funding for services has moved from central government to local authorities, many local authorities have worked to further devolve decision-making and budgetary decisions to local communities. This means that in some parts of the country, local communities are strongly engaged with the local authority, and structures exist to support these partnerships. This move towards greater local control highlights the exciting potential to tackle many priorities (environmental, public service reform, etc.) by adopting a resilience approach and involving local people in community action and resilience building. In recent years, some local authorities have become real innovators in new forms of service delivery, partnership working and more. The replication issue applies here too. Is there currently an easy way to access best practice and role models in this area? Building national resilience: Most approaches towards community resilience take place at a geographic community level. However, examples from UK history and from other countries indicate real benefits in national-level approaches towards resilience. Some of the countries that are considered the most resilient, such as Japan, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, have a strong national resilience policy. If the UK had this too, it would make local initiatives more effective. Online resilience services: A massive opportunity for innovation! If I continue to dream, I imagine social entrepreneurs and progressive NGOs helping to create new apps and web services, alongside businesses.