28/02/2022
Resilience… With the current state of the world, this quote, this theme seemed applicable.
“I understand a lot of people find the concept of resilience repugnant because they think it’s just about telling people to pull up their socks. That’s not how we conceptualise it. And all our practical approaches carefully consider the roles of communities and wider social forces too.”
Angie Hart is a Professor at University of Brighton, where she has revolutionized the subject matter of resiliency and coping methods of resilience. She researched this subject matter as she watched over her three adoptive children and began her theoretical decent.
In the intervening years Angie has gained a therapeutic qualification and ended up being both a university resilience researcher and a community practitioner in child and adolescent mental health. A local charity in South Africa, use the practical, evidence-based resilience building tools that she has developed in collaboration with parents, young people, other academics and practitioners. She’s received funding from many sources for this work, including the UK research councils and local authorities, and now directs our University’s Centre of Resilience for Social Justice. The South African charity explains that they are using the tools with all schools across a large town. They say how grateful they are to Boingboing, the social enterprise that Angie set up with a colleague in 2010, for making tools and publications freely available on their website. Boingboing employs people with lived experience of complex life challenges.
Colleagues in many European countries are using Angie’s work, including in Greece where her community-based approaches to supporting children in schools are being implemented. And it’s not just mental health that Angie's resilience work has covered. She’s heading up a research-council funded co-productive research project with young people facing complex challenges in South Africa and the UK. That project is on resilience to drought.
Resilience can assist in Change!
Bio from University of Brighton, Pauline Wigglesworth, Blackpool Council.
