Woodland Resilience Immersions - Seeding Our Future

A new approach for health professionals.

doctors2-600 The endless grind between rising demands and shrinking resources puts all health professionals at risk of depletion or burnout.

Woodland Resilience Immersions offer a different way to gain new insights and skills, to raise your resilience and nourish your wellbeing.

These intensives have been jointly developed by the Seeding our Future project, with Westminster Centre for Resilience and Hazel Hill Trust.

PROGRAMMES

Whilst the idea of Nature immersion for medics may seem novel, there is good research evidence for it, for example in the book Your Brain on Nature from Harvard Medical School. Programmes can be tailored to different client groups and a range of formats:

One-night residential: Typically a 24 to 36 hour workshop including overnight stay at Hazel Hill Wood (see more below). Key elements include:

Conservation work and physical activities together to de-stress, relax into the woods and shift gear.
An evening campfire circle for sharing, mutual support and insights on work stresses
Learning about resilience from the woodland ecosystem, and practical tools for our own wellbeing and our teams.
Practicing simple techniques based on applied neurobiology, mindfulness and traditional sources which can be used in everyday work.
Processes and time to consider better approaches for tackling work challenges and systemic pressures.

Action Learning Programme: A group of 10-18 participants share a journey over 4-8 months exploring issues in depth, which may be individual, team, or systemic. Each programme typically involves residentials at Hazel Hill Wood, plus group sessions in the workplace, online support, Skype calls etc. These programmes can be delivered in partnership with Westminster Centre for Resilience or with others, or by our team.

One-day non-residential: This would cover some elements of the one-night residential, but on a taster basis.

WHO IS IT FOR?

Participants to date include a wide range of professionals in the NHS, and other parts of the health and care sector, such as hospices and private care homes, ranging from junior doctors to consultants, from carers to senior managers.

FACILITATORS

The three partner organisations involved can draw on a wide range of facilitators with experience in the health sector. The lead facilitators are:

Marcos Frangos: General Manager of Hazel Hill Trust. Has led numerous resilience programmes for health professionals and other front-line services, and managed wellbeing strategy in large local authority.

Alan Heeks: Founder/Chair of Hazel Hill Trust. Many years’ experience in using ecosystems as a model for human resilience, and has created the Seven Seeds of Natural Happiness model. See www.naturalhappiness.net.

David Peters: Trained as a GP, and has worked in a range of professional roles in the NHS. Founder and Director of the Westminster Centre for Resilience, now as Emeritus Professor.

Daghni Rajasingam: is a consultant and Deputy Director for Postgraduate Medical Education at Guys and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and has worked closely with WCR for several years.

Jane Sanders: is a psychotherapist and group leader with a special interest in ecopsychology and deep ecology, with several years’ experience of leading resilience and wellbeing groups at Hazel Hill Wood.

Alan Kellas: worked as a GP in NHS, private holistic and self-help settings, then as a consultant NHS community and inpatient psychiatrist for children and adults with learning disabilities, and as tutor on the whole person care programme at Bristol Medical School. He has a deep interest in nature connections as a factor in health.

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ABOUT HAZEL HILL WOOD

Hazel Hill is a magical 70-acre wood, near Salisbury. It has simple, yet beautifully crafted off-grid wooden buildings with lovely indoor and outdoor group spaces, basic accommodation in bedrooms and sleeping lofts (or camping), good hot showers and compost loos. The wood is run by an educational charity whose aims are to promote wellbeing, resilience and sustainability through programmes at the wood for a wide variety of client groups.

INTERESTED?

To discuss a tailored programme, please contact Marcos Frangos: 07881-425804, or .
For more information on open events, see www.hazelhill.org.uk and www.futurescanning.org.
Download a PDF flyer for this event: Click here.

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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.