Resilience for social justice: research is bringing an inclusive revolution in mental health

Resilient Therapy for social justice

Between 2008 and 2013, Resilient Therapy was applied in different settings where it was observed to bring changes not only in the young people themselves but also in the wider system, including families, schools and services. Applying a practice theory lens to Resilient Therapy evaluations, Professor Angie Hart and Dr Kay Aranda recognised that resilient moves were enacted in different ways dependent on the context of the wider environment. This observation underpinned a conceptual link between resilience and social justice and they went on to test this in new research between 2013 and 2017 within the Imagine Programme. 

The Social Context work package led by Angie Hart for the programme was a series of action research projects involving academics and community partners from Germany, Crete, Sweden, England, Wales, Scotland, Malaysia and Turkey. Working with a range of risk groups in multiple adverse contexts, it investigated ways of researching and building resilience using Resilient Therapy, at the same time drawing on the concept of Communities of Practice pioneered by Professor Etienne Wenger-Trayner and Jean Lave.

These mixed-methods approaches allowed for a co-produced contextual knowledge and understanding of complex social situations and individual experiences across groups of people. In this way, Resilient Therapy could  be researched with a range of risk groups including young people with learning difficulties, young people in institutionalised care, with child neglect history, those with mental health problems and social disadvantage, families struggling with social disadvantage, and practitioners with burnout and mental health issues. 

The work undertaken in the Imagine Programme helped forge an inclusive and robust conceptualisation of resilience that paid attention to the individual, societal, and environmental interactions simultaneously. Changes observed directly with individuals and within the systems validated the theoretical conceptualisation of resilience as, ‘overcoming adversity, whilst also potentially subtly changing, or even dramatically transforming (aspects of) that adversity.’  Individuals were empowered to take collective action with a shared interest, building capacity, knowledge, skills and relationships within the community, respecting and promoting differences, challenging power imbalances and creating opportunities for collective learning. 

Co-production was at the heart of these findings, proving its value in producing robust insights and sustainable changes. The centre’s social enterprise network, Boingboing, was set up in 2010 with ESRC funding, and was used to propose a set of principles to guide the ways in which resilience could be fostered in disadvantaged children and young people. Advanced Resilient Therapy now situates resilience within a social-justice oriented complex system perspective aiming to optimise the socio-ecological environment of individuals. At practice level, this indicates that, for sustainable impact on young people’s health and wellbeing, interventions should: contain several interacting actions such as workforce training, targeted individual support and system change; have multiple outcomes which both increase individual protective mechanisms and reduce systemic risk factors; target and work with multiple stakeholder groups including individuals, their families, schools, and services; and be flexibly tailored to identified needs and resources. 

The University of Brighton and Boingboing promote the adoption and adaptation of Resilient Therapy through an ongoing programme of research, practice and training. Through targeted implementation strategies that adapt approaches to user needs, organisational structures and cultural contexts the programme has produced wide-scale benefits across council and charity services, education systems and services, practitioners, and amongst communities and individuals. The engagement strategy has evolved to focus on a whole systems approach to delivering change to ensure that capacity, resources and results are maximised in a holistic manner. The Resilience Framework, which distils the book’s principles into a visual one-page grid, has facilitated use of Resilient Therapy by a wide range of services, practitioners and children or young people, including the Merseyside Youth Association and the Liverpool Child and Mental Health Services (CAMHS) who have used the framework to underpin new training programmes to cascade resilience support within schools in Liverpool.

The Academic Resilience Approach: bringing change to school systems and education services 

Derived from this process, the free, web-based Academic Resilience Approach was a Resilient Therapy derivate co-developed and designed to be user-friendly for schools. Dr Eryigit-Madzwamuse applied this system-based approach to resilience in schools in Durham, considering a social-justice-orientated whole school approach which aimed to mitigate the wellbeing and attainment differences between socially disadvantaged pupils and mainstream pupils. Using the Academic Resilience Approach, schools can self-assess and develop action plans for improving practice, structures and processes to initiate sustainable, systemic change. Web resources are also available for school staff to access ad hoc. The Academic Resilience Approach is a whole systems approach that is flexible to access and deliver, depending on a school or district’s needs and resources. Schools can either use the online resources, participate in training or request further facilitation for the implementation of the the approach in their schools. 

Over 300 individual schools across the UK received training or facilitation support on the Academic Resilience Approach from Boingboing or YoungMinds over the five years from 2016-2021. On a local authority scale the approach has been adopted and/or adapted in Blackpool, Newham and Kent through HeadStart, and in Durham, North Yorkshire, and East Sussex through County Council supported implementation. The therapy has been taken to international communities too. In Malaysia Resilient Therapy is used in psychological counselling with different risk groups. In Turkey the Academic Resilience Approach is being adopted by the Department of Education. While in Greece a project has helped to understand the complex social-emotional dynamics that are triggered in their relationships with the ‘challenging’ students and mainly with the parents, through a method that helped teachers feel lees threatened and more confident in developing alternative methods of working with those students, their parents and their colleagues.

Advising the National Lottery HeadStart Programme

Redesigning whole-systems interventions for children and young people’s services  contributed directly to the design and delivery of the UK-wide National Lottery HeadStart Programme, with £75,000,000 invested into six new partnerships. This is the largest funder of community activity in the UK and one of five long-term strategic investments in England to tackle some of society’s most entrenched social problems. Research from the Centre of Resilience for Social Justice has ensured recognition of the need for a shared language of resilience, and a whole system approach, with Angie Hart playing a key role in developing the strategy that initiated this national programme.

Blackpool’s Resilience Revolution 

In Blackpool the £11,000,000, town-wide pilot of the Resilience Revolution led by Blackpool Council, is a first in testing advanced Resilient Therapy, embedding social-justice on a whole-system scale through a focus on shared resilience language, integrated training and workforce development, and opportunities for young people to engage in practice development and strategic decision making.  

Blackpool’s pilot of the Resilience Revolution published a manifesto for community development with 18 organisations quickly signing up and confirming their commitment to work with Advanced Resilient Therapy principles in their practice. For instance, Blackpool Grand Theatre engaged in a 2-year project on Story-Led Resilient Therapy co-producing with Blackpool C/YP and the Grand Junior Artists, Blackpool’s Young Shakespeare Council changed their approach and are now co-producing their practice with children and young people.  

Across Blackpool, a shared resilience language has been developed through Resilient Therapy workshops for young people, parents and community members alongside workforce training across health, social care and early intervention services. This approach has led to systemic change in wider service design with Blackpool Council establishing new committees at the heart of Children’s Services and Education Departments. All 43 Blackpool schools have implemented the Academic Resilience Approach, with 390 pupils actively engaged in decision-making and initiatives as members of Pupil Resilient Committees in their schools. In one school for example, the Pupil Resilient Committee identified bullying as the top priority, leading to a re-launch of the anti-bullying programme, with pupils driving the work. 

Resilient Therapy has been applied in different settings, revealing that the Communities of Practice approaches helped bring changes, not only in children and young people themselves, but also in the wider support systems including families, schools and public sector services. By 2021, over 70,000 education, NHS, Social Care and Voluntary and Community Sector practitioners across a range of disciplines had received training in the Resilient Therapy (RT). It has been translated into multiple complex interventions including Blackpool’s whole town approach and the whole school approach provided by the Academic Resilience Approach. These implementations have led to significant health, public policy, service, societal and culture shift impact with long-lasting benefits locally, nationally and internationally.

Paving slabs created to build a 'resilience walkway' in Blackpool as part of the town-wide Resilience Revolution.

Social justice through resilient practices for vulnerable children and adults

Since its inception, the work of the Centre of Resilience for Social Justice has an increasing focus on challenging and changing unjust practices, systems and structures. Early series of action research activities worked with a range of groups facing major disadvantages. These included children and young people with learning difficulties,  care experienced young people, those with a history of child neglect and young people with mental health difficulties.  Later developments have moved from research predominantly centred on children and young people to a broader range of those of facing systemic disadvantage as well. This includes, but is not limited to, supporting the mental health and resilience of adults in recovery, ex-offenders, practitioners, adults with learning disabilities and more. Through the Resilience Revolution, researchers have also learnt that activism has the power to build resilience and boost mental wellbeing, and this is reflected in the range of research projects that have engaged with Activism for Resilience’. 

The teams continue to refine and develop core areas of research based on the ever popular Resilience Framework as well as the thriving Academic Resilience Approach. The combined research has demonstrated how people from very different backgrounds bring about better and more resilient collective futures.