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Banner showing symbols of human resilience through creative and research practice including hand printed green heart and purple bird, lantern modelling and banner-making
Centre of Resilience for Social Justice
  • What we do
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  • Who we are
  • What is Resilience Research?
  • What we do
    • What we do
    • Child and family resilience
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    • Role resilience and workforce development
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  • Child and family resilience

Child and family resilience

Mechanisms of resilience that are effective in childhood provide vital coping and integrative practices for healthy adult lives. The Centre of Resilience for Social Justice improves the lives of young people through a deeper understanding of the way communities and individuals develop and deploy supportive frameworks, and works directly with them to implement exemplary change.

A paint-splattered board with the word 'Resilient' made out of plasticine depicting resilience research with children.
Can’t wait to get stuck in with the University of Brighton and friends to find better ways to build child and family resilience. People are really struggling in Greece at the moment and this project is very exciting. It will be great to compare what we’re doing with what goes on in Brighton, Hastings and Scotland too. I told one of our local farmers about the project – she’s got a child with complex needs and they are really struggling financially. We can be quite hierarchical here. So she was a bit worried about being an expert parent in a learning group... Still, she said she’d pitch in with some local cheese for a picnic after the first meeting so that should break the ice. People are a bit anxious about working together in what I hear you are calling a ‘democratic learning space’, but they are very enthusiastic

Dr Maria Georgiadi, Child and Family Development Worker, Diagnostic and Support Centre, Ministry of Education, Rethymno, Crete

Research findings into practice

We work to put our research findings into practice, mobilising academic knowledge alongside people’s lived expertise. This includes theoretical, analytical methodologies and we also organise intervention through a range of projects that involve young lives from birth to adolescence. The Resilience Framework we have developed emphasises the importance of the social and the individual working together to improve the odds for young people. To support this we work at the interface of development and systems models, with expertise not only from healthcare, but also art and design practices, human geography, socio-political studies and education.

The Centre of Resilience for Social Justice aims to promote different forms of community-building that ignite imagination about the future and help to build resilience and a momentum for change. Also building on ideas of Resilient Therapy (RT) to develop and apply new ways of working with disadvantaged children, we seek to make changes that are sustainable and which support the most disadvantaged families.

Resilient Therapy grew out of resilience research carried out by Hart, Blincow and Thomas (2007) and is a way of working with disadvantaged children, young people and their families, in order to help them overcome adversity, literally to ‘bounce back’), adhering to four key principles or noble truths: ‘Accepting’, ‘Conserving’, ‘Commitment’ and ‘Enlisting’ and to five conceptual arenas: ‘Basics’, ‘Belonging’, ‘Learning’, ‘Coping’ and ‘Core Self’.

Through this and with a history of research experience and community intervention we work with schools to ensure that resilience frameworks are conceptually sound, co-produced with schools, including parents and students, grounded in an inequalities imagination and, ultimately, steer away from a simplistic reliance on strengthening children’s individual characteristics.

To achieve these ends, the centre has co-developed Boingboing, as a nimble, responsive organisation to operate through academic and practical means directly with the public as advisors, organisers and researchers. This has enabled us to take up opportunities unachievable solely through the university, for example in our contract to support resilience approaches across the town of Blackpool.

 

A group of young people from a project in Leandra South AfricaIn Leandra, South Africa, as part of our Resilience to Drought project, Simon Duncan supported an image film-making workshop with young co-researchers exploring drought, led by Selogadi Mampane. (Photograph, Simon Duncan)

Example projects in child and family resilience

How to make changes that are sustainable and which support the most disadvantaged families is a key focus of our work. We are committed to research with, and for, families where children and/or parents have mental health or learning difficulties, supporting parents, young people and practitioners to help families do better than expected; through this we evolve practicable models and promote methods at the heart of successful projects with realist understanding of the diversity of these communities and the range of effective interventions.

A black logo for Imagine against a white background, 'Connecting communities through research.

The imagine project

A young boy reaching out with painted hands.

Bouncing Back - South East coastal communities programme

A group of young people sitting in a circle in a collaborative arts workshop in Leandra.

Resilience among young people in a community affected by drought

A slightly abstract drawing of young people for People Places, a targeted youth service

Resilience community of practice – targeted youth service

Clay letterset with words Make Your Mark from children's resilience through art project

Building resilience through community arts practice

A photograph of a premature baby.

Long-term outcomes of preterm birth: risk and resilience

Painted wall from Changing Lanes project

Resilience to re-offending

A drawing of a queue of people in front of community buildings and the title 'Academic Resilience'.

Academic resilience approach 

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