In a recent webinar, experts discussed the concept of Transformation Resilience Coordinating Networks (TRCNs) as a grassroots approach to addressing the climate, ecosystem, and biodiversity crisis at the neighborhood and community level.
The two-part session explored both the structural framework for establishing TRCNs and provided guidance on how existing organizations can transform into these networks to enhance local climate resilience. The presentation emphasized the critical importance of implementing TRCNs widely and outlined fundamental steps for their organization and operation.
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ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Well, welcome everyone to the first session of the Community of Practice on the UN High Level Climate Champion Race to Resilience Initiative to organize, to help organize transformational resilience coordinating networks in North America and worldwide for the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis. My name is Bob Doppelt.
I coordinate the International Transformational Resilience Coalition. Before we get started, I want to say a great big thanks to our partners in this initiative. Besides the UN High Level Climate Champion Race to Resilience Initiative, the Campaign for Trauma Informed Policy and Practice, and Jesse Kohler, the Executive Director who's handling the logistics of this webinar, and Trauma Informed Oregon at Portland State University.
Thanks to all of you. And you can see all of the co sponsors that are co sponsoring the initiative. And all the web and logos down below there from all over the world, and we thank all of you for your support for this initiative. The key message I want to share is that community is medicine. Throughout human history, our ability to band together and cooperate has always been key to providing the mutual aid and emotional support needed to help people survive, remain healthy and resilient during crisis, and thrive.
and solve complex problems.
And by organizing what we call Transformation Resilience Coordinating Networks, I'll explain this in a second what that means, in neighborhoods and communities everywhere, we can do this again now for the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis. So the goal of this short two session community practice is to give you enough information to decide, to decide if you Transformation Resilience Coordinating Network in your community or neighborhood or take an existing organization and group and make it into a TRCN to address the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis.
Today's focus is going to be on the structure of how you structure these. Next week's focus, the second focus, will be on the content to focus on. Um, so today's focus is on why it is vital to organize, uh, Transformation Resilience Coordinating Networks, TRCNs as we call them, and to do that everywhere.
We'll talk about the basic steps for organizing and operating a Transformation Resilience Coordinating Network, and we'll have a discussion with Bevan Boyd, who's a Resilient Community Officer for the North Carolina Smart Start Healthy and Resilient Communities Initiative, and she'll show, talk about how.
And how her initiative her program has organized these kinds of networks. Before we get going, I want to just start with a short resilience pause. And the goal of this is to help you learn how you can, uh, become practice resilience within your own self and how you can help others do the same. Uh, if you organize a Transformation Resilience Coordinating Network, organizing resilience pauses throughout the meetings, et cetera, could be very helpful.
So I want to ask you to start by identifying the resources you have, uh, to, uh, prevent serious traumas or distresses and or heal them when they might emerge. So think back to a time when you experienced severe stress, or were traumatized emotionally and psychologically by something. Uh, maybe it's the loss or an injury of a loved one, uh, job issues, relationship issues, whatever.
Just try to bring it to mind sometime when you were stressed or traumatized. And if you were able to prevent serious emotional harm or heal when you were harmed, what were the most helpful elements? How did that actually happen? For example, was it having a person or group you trusted to talk with? Was it specific skills or strengths you relied on?
Was there specific practices? or activities you engaged in. Just see if you can bring that to mind, just very briefly. And I'm going to do this rather quickly. You might want to do this after the community practice is over, spend more time thinking about it. But if you can remember what it was that helped you prevent serious harm or heal them, remembering those resources, that help you prevent stress and trauma and heal when you did can help you can show you how you can strengthen and maintain them in the future and that can be life saving for all of us.
And if you help others remember and strengthen their resources, it will help them as well and give you meaning and purpose in your life. Very powerful to do that. So we're going to start with some breakout rooms just to, so as a bunch of people on the line, but we want you to just get a chance to meet some people.
Jesse is going to now organize you into groups of three to five people. Just get a chance to introduce yourself. Where you live, type of work you do, share your favorite dessert, yum, dessert, um, and then as a group discuss, just briefly discuss why you are participating and what you hope to gain from the community practice.
This is just a way to get you to allow you to meet some other people. So I'm going to turn it over to Jesse and you will automatically go into breakout rooms. Uh, and then, uh, you'll get a notice when it's about, uh, a minute left to come back to the breakout room. So Jesse. All right, everyone. Um, breakout rooms are going to be opened up.
If you have any problems, you can always come back to the main room or message us, but we look forward to seeing you all in about 10 minutes here. And Christian's going to post the questions that I just asked, uh, read to you in chat so you know what to do,
uh, any comments, questions, comments or questions, et cetera. So. Jesse, let me know when everybody's back. Everyone's back now, Bob. Okay, great. Well, again, I hope you had a good session. We just wanted to give you a chance to just get a sense of who else was there, introduce yourself, et cetera. And, uh, now we're going to spend some time talking about the content here, uh, and focus in on why should we form these community resilience networks everywhere?
And the reason is because no one is safe. The climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis is going to impact everyone. And I think the three words there are really important. We've tended to think about this as they just a climate and atmospheric climate issue. It's not, what we're seeing is widespread degradation of ecological systems around the world and loss of biodiversity around the world.
Those interact and and actually further disrupt the global climate system and the global climate system disruption is causing more loss and degradation of ecosystems of biodiversity. So it's really a climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis. And it's going to impact everyone. I'm going to give you some bad news for the next couple of slides.
So hang in there with me if you would. Most of you might know the global average temperatures have already risen by 1. 5 degrees Celsius, 2. 7 degree Fahrenheit above pre industrial levels for an entire year. We first thought that wasn't going to happen to mid century or later. It happened this past year, and it pushes us closer to possible irreversible impacts.
Thank you And even if all greenhouse gas emissions are swiftly eliminated, which is just not possible, they're still going up, actually, global temperatures will continue to rise for at least 40 years due to what's called thermal inertia, which means it just takes time for the heat to dissipate. And every small increase in global temperatures is going to create more harm.
Just as importantly, under current emissions path, there's the abrupt collapses of ecosystems and catastrophic biodiversity loss are going to begin more than likely before the end of this decade in the tropical areas and then move northwards. And most of the impacts grow gradually Then suddenly because they hit tipping points.
Uh, so we don't notice so much. Oh, it's just sort of happening. And you know, it's a little warmer, etc. Then boom, something happens because they've hit a critical tipping point that the system can no longer control just I'm just going to zip through this. But here's just a few of the impact. We're seeing this year already.
drought, extreme rainfall and record wave heat waves in sub Saharan Africa, also food shortages, consequently extreme heat in North Africa, India and Saudi Arabia, abnormal snow and rain near the Black Sea, snow near the Black Sea, um, the hottest temperatures ever recorded, some driest and unprecedented wildfires in Brazil and in the Amazon.
and other Latin American South American nations. Heavy rainfall and flooding in the Persian Gulf and East Africa. Record heat waves, record flooding in Quebec, Canada, and wildfires in the Canadian Rockies. The hottest summer ever recorded in Europe with Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France and Morocco experiencing deadly heat waves and really widespread wildfires in mid summer.
And here in the U. S. We saw supersized hurricanes just a couple of weeks ago, uh, that damaged and killed people in the southeast of the U. S., all the way up to the Carolinas, which nobody ever expected, to Western Carolina, record heat, record wildfires in the West, heat waves, etc. And there's many other climate aggravated events.
That are impacting millions of people. Um, so on top of many other stresses and traumas that our people are experiencing today, you have the direct impacts of the climate ecosystem, biodiversity crisis on mental wellness. There's widespread traumas caused by those punishing weather events that can impact individuals, families, entire communities, entire cultures and nations.
And there's widespread distresses caused by the cascading disruptions. to the ecological, social, built, and economic systems people rely on for food, water, shelter, jobs, incomes, health care, safety, and other basic survival needs. So it goes way beyond just the disasters. But just as importantly, there's physical injuries and chronic health problems caused by issues like inhaling wildfire smoke or just the impacts of extreme heat that can cause depression, anxiety, violence, and other mental health and psychosocial problems.
And there's the emotional distresses that are caused by fossil fuel pollution related illnesses and death, which are estimated to be at least 45 million by 2050, by the World Economic Forum, not what you'd call a really progressive group. Uh, most of the time, and they acknowledge that that's likely to be very likely to be a vast underestimate, but then there's the indirect effects of the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis on mental wellness and psychosocial well being.
There's emotional stress caused by the bio psychological changes. such as disruptive sleep patterns caused by hotter weather. There is distress caused by changes in lifestyle required to address and adapt to the climate crisis, like involuntary migration, having to leave your community, your house, etc.
Giving up fossil fuels, uh, uh, uh, powered goods, changing vehicles to electric vehicles, heating and cooling systems, etc. There's mounting worry, anxiety, fear, anger, and hopelessness about what the future will bring, ego anxiety, climate grief, solastasia. This is what we focused on a lot, but it's just one of many, many impacts as you can see.
And all of this is producing psychological traumas due to shattered beliefs about the nature of the world and how it works. And how we should think and act in it that can shatter our personal beliefs, shatter our religious beliefs, our economic theories, our political beliefs, and consequently also cause harsh pushback.
By many people to maintain their current beliefs and assumptions, and we're seeing that many, many places in different times and ways. Everyone is going to be impacted. This is a population level problem, but in the near term, those at greatest risk include many middle and lower income nations. that have added very little to the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis, but are really being impacted.
BIPOC residents, Black, Indigenous, people of color, who also have, for the most part, added very little to the crisis. Low income populations, migrants in almost every location, ethnic minorities, minorities of single women, people living alone, the elderly, people with insecure housing, and people within with pre existing conditions and first responders.
Climate impacts are aggravating existing inequalities and injustices and adding new ones that create even greater impacts for many of these groups. But we need to be careful about how vulnerability is framed and addressed. Part of the reason is that a disrupted climate ecosystem biodiversity system is often making assessments of who is vulnerable very flawed.
Um, and we saw that in North Carolina just recently with Hurricane Helene in the U. S. Nobody expected West South Carolina to get impacted by that hurricane. That way. Um, uh, and we just cannot project all of the impacts that are gonna happen and only focus focusing on the vulnerable and allow wealthier people to think that they are immune from the issue.
And so they don't need to cut pol their emissions or change their policies and practices that are causing or contributing to the climate crisis. So be, be careful about that. So, unless we build population level transformation resilience, the combination of these impacts is likely to create a global epidemic of stresses and traumas, the psychological, emotional, and spiritual distresses we're seeing everywhere.
Uh, eco anxiety, climate anxiety is all part of that, but we're also seeing individual traumas. And that is where either a series or events or an acute event overwhelms a person and shatters their basic assumptions and beliefs about themselves, the world, that it's a safe place, et cetera, et cetera. Um, that's happening all over due to the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis, but we're also seeing community traumas where entire communities are just are traumatized by a wildfire or a flood or a storm that harms everybody or food and water shortages that harms everybody.
It includes individual trauma, but it also that community trauma means that people lose faith that the community is there to support them. And we're seeing societal traumas emerge. Both community and societal traumas are often called collective trauma, but a community trauma is narrowed, usually described as a geographic area.
A societal trauma is entire nations, entire cultures. The COVID pandemic, 19 pandemic, was a classic societal trauma, and we're seeing this happen around the world as people are traumatized by the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis. And unless we initiate initiatives to prevent and heal the impacts, the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis is going to be the greatest societal trauma modern society has ever experienced.
Mental health and human services cannot address these challenges. They will remain important where, when, and for whom they exist. But in many communities and in many nations, there are few or no providers. And due to fear of being stigmatized that they can gauge the racism embedded in the system, conflicting religious beliefs, high cost and other factors, at least 50 percent of the people who could benefit from mental health and human services won't engage.
And just as importantly, mental health and human services are reactive. They mostly treat individuals with symptoms after they appear. They do not proactively prevent widespread problems by building resilience or activating transformational change. And it's important to really understand that there is no community resilience.
without widespread social, psychological, and emotional resilience. Community resilience, as we define it in most countries, has really focused on external physical factors, housing, infrastructure, transportation systems, etc. And while that's important, most of this work is done by non profits, NGOs, by private companies or public agencies, That might get feedback on a on a plan from the public, but don't really involve meaningfully local residents, and they rarely integrate building social, psychological, emotional resilience.
Uh, and that's what we're bring resilience into their work, but is often seen as again again using North Carolina in Hurricane Helene is a classic example. Many external physical effort efforts will have limit effect or fail and the impacts of the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis go far beyond those extreme weather events, and this underscores the urgency of placing an equal emphasis on strengthening the human dimensions of resilience.
The reality is that climate traumas, the mental health issues, and other traumas, uh, occurring today result from interacting individual family, social, economic, built, and ecological factors. This is the social ecological model. You can get information about it, uh, on the web, lots of places, but as you see at the bottom, it is true that an individual genes and their biology and their early childhood experiences greatly influence ability of an individual's ability, uh, for mental wellness.
and resilience throughout their lifetime, uh, as they grow older. But that is significantly influenced by interpersonal factors, the connections they have with friends, family, social networks, and their social norms and values that they live within. All of that is affected, uh, by, uh, the conditions of their communities, their workplaces, schools, voluntary and civic groups, religious and spiritual association.
All of those forces are influenced by structural factors, policies, institutions, power relationships, the type of power, the services that are available, and all of those factors are greatly influenced by the environment in which people exist, the conditions of food and water, open space, green spaces, built environment, housing, transportation, et cetera, economic systems, ecological systems.
So there's an old saying, a Native American saying, that we are shaped by all our relationships. And there's a Bantu term in southern South Africa, Ubuntu, I am because we are, since we are, therefore I am. So we have to address all of these interacting forces to help people survive and remain healthy and resilient during the long climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis.
And this means we have two urgent tasks in front of us. First, to provide the mutual aid and emotional support, uh, needed to help all residents remain physically, socially, psychologically, emotionally safe, healthy and resilient, uh, as they use adversities, uh, as a catalyst to find new purpose, meaning, and courage and hope in life and thrive.
And this has to be linked, very closely linked with mobilizing local residents, groups and organizations to do their part to reduce. The climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis to manageable levels and create safe, healthy and resilient and just local, physical, social, economic and ecological conditions. Uh, and these 2 interconnected paths require that we move beyond many long held assumptions, beliefs, theories and practices that dominate the mental health world, for example, and really, uh, uh, get out of our professional silos.
We really have to get out of our personal and professional silos. to think systemically and respond holistically. But if we do this, and we use the Climate Ecosystem Biodiversity Crisis as a teaching tool, what can we learn from what's happening? We can use this to learn, grow, adapt, and activate deep seated transformational changes.
So what does resilience then mean for the Climate Ecosystem Biodiversity Crisis? To some it means bouncing back. That's what we don't have thought it meant in the psychology world, especially, which involves recovering from adversities and returning to previous conditions.
To others it means grit or toughness, which is the ability to withstand adversities and keep doing the same thing as you were doing before.
But both of these notions are very insufficient. For the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis because we cannot resist adapting and transforming things. It's just not going to be possible and we cannot try to return to and maintain the status quo because that is causing and contributing to the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis as well as mental health and psychosocial problems worldwide.
We must instead proactively build population level mental wellness and what we call transformational resilience. What does this mean? When suffering is caused by previously unseen external forces that have no endpoint, resolution, or simple cure, and that is what the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis is, the priority must be to help everyone develop the capacity to buffer themselves from and push back against those stressors?
and use adversities as transformational catalysts to learn anew about the self and the world, adapt, and find new sources of meaning, purpose, courage, and hope in life. So what does that mean in more specific, uh, terms? Uh, we call it helping everyone strengthen their capacity for presencing or self regulation and co regulation to calm their body, mind, emotions, and behaviors during traumatic stressors.
And help others do so as well. Helping others is what co regulation is about. Um, uh, presencing really, they call, the term is because you're coming back to the present moment to notice what's happening now, be with it, not worrying about the future, not worrying about the past, you're in the present moment.
And just as importantly is purposing or adversity based growth. or post traumatic growth. It's a version of that, which is the ability to learn from adversities and find new meaning and direction that reveals new strengths and skills that you never thought you had. It helps you develop much stronger bonds and connections with certain people, greater appreciation life, and many other beneficial factors that you have to experience through the adversity.
Presencing and purposing are primary prevention. And the combination can rebuild faith and hope in the future. Here's a way to think about transformation resilience. We all have a certain level of functioning. Then an adverse event comes along, uh, a serious problem. We have physical, uh, issue, struggles at work, relationship issues, whatever it might be, and we can be dysregulated.
We can get depressed or we can get angry all the time, whatever it might be. Most of us have the ability to recover. We calm our body, our, our nervous system, and we return to some semblance of pre crisis level. But many other people use that adversity. As an opportunity to grow, that's what purposing is, to find new purpose in life.
This is what transformational resilience is about, moving beyond previous levels of functioning while holding the pain of the trauma and managing it in different ways. And it requires a choice, continue to suffer or experience, uh, uh, or to experience, honestly examine and learn, uh, new about the world and ourselves and find meaning in adversities By viewing them as lessons that can transform our pain into new constructive actions, um, uh, transformation resilience again is that adversity based growth.
This is really what is needed, uh, to respond to the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis. And why do we want to do this at the population level? Um, the noted clinical pioneer, uh, psychologist, Dr. George Albee, once said, no epidemic has ever been resolved by paying attention to the treatment of an affected individual.
He's a psychologist. He's talking about mental health issues, not a physical health issue. So this applies just as much to widespread mental health and psychosocial issues as it does to, uh, uh, physical health issues. And this underscores the urgent need to expand our approach to prioritize a public health approach to mental wellness and transformational resilience.
A public health approach to mental wellness and resilience takes a population level approach, not one that merely focuses on individuals with symptoms of pathology or high risk groups, though they are included using what's called proportionate universalism and life course approaches. They are part of the issue, part of the approach, and we have to remember that our mantra will always be leave no one behind.
A public health approach to mental wellness and transformation resilience prioritizes preventing problems before they emerge, not merely reacting to or treating them after they appear, and it integrates group and community minded healing methods into the prevention strategies. We must always remember that prevention is the cure.
Leave no one behind, and prevention is the cure. And we accomplish those public health approach accomplishes those goals by strengthening protective factors, engaging residents and strengthen protective factors, social support networks, resilient skills, habits, local resources, et cetera, the build and sustain.
Healthy thinking behaviors. Again, not just trying to fix deficits or treat individuals with symptoms of pathology after they emerge. So we must continue to try to build on strengths, build social connections and build resources. And research shows that we can do this, that mental wellness and transformation resilience can be enhanced, and that the most effective way to do that is to establish the social infrastructure in community, the horizontal social infrastructure, connections between organizations and groups around the community or neighborhood.
That we call a Transformation Resilience Coordinating Network. Many communities are doing this and they call it whatever resonates locally. Uh, but you engage a broad and diverse array of grassroots, neighborhood, faith, spirituality, youth, education, mental health, and human services, disaster management, private business, and many other public, private, and non profit organizations that jointly develop strategies That mobilize residents to cooperatively provide mutual aid and emotional support to others and strengthen as many protective factors as possible.
Why do this in communities? Because this is where most people spend their time, spend most of their time and interact most directly with other people and with the physical, built, economic and ecological environment. And it's where most people directly experience the impacts of the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis.
Working with single populations in isolation with, from others can be helpful, but be careful that it doesn't reinforce the siloing, marginalization, and stigmatization that often contributes to many of today's problems. So here's an example. Why do we need, uh, these transformation resilience coordinating networks?
These are the common phases of disasters over on the far left. You see in most disasters, not all you, you have some warning. It might be hours, might be days, might be years. We've we've known for 30 or 40 years about the climate and ecosystem biodiversity crisis, but have done almost nothing to prepare for it or to reduce it.
Then the impacts come along. The direct impacts of a major weather event, for example, um, can impact 10, 20 to 40 percent of the people directly impacted, uh, and 10 to 20 percent of others who watch it from afar, first responders. Then it goes through the heroic phase. Or people who don't know anybody know each other step forward, put their life on the line to help others and save others.
And then as the, the impact start to phase down some, the community cohesion phase, uh, happens, uh, also called the honeymoon phase. And this is where people who don't know each other might not even like each other. They come together. And they provide food, water, shelter, um, power, uh, to recharge cell phones now and other sorts of ways to support each other.
Uh, and it's really what people, uh, focus on in these disasters. It's a community cohesion phase. It's very powerful. But after a few days or months, depending on the disaster, the community cohesion phase ends. Because people have to go back and put their own lives back together. They have to deal with damage or loss.
Residences, lost loved ones, or harmed loved ones, or whatever it might be. And so you enter what's called the disillusionment phase. And this can go on for months, uh, days or months or even years, um, uh, and some people don't ever recover, as you can see down the bottom, but most people begin to recover after they begin to come to terms and work through their grief, and it can take months or years.
But they can regress or can be blocked completely if in fact they experience another severe disaster or relentless stressors. But if they don't, eventually people will bounce back, so to speak, return to where they, some semblance of where they were. So why do we need to establish these Transformation Resilience Coordinated Networks everywhere?
Because the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis is going to continue for decades. Most mental health and psychosocial problems surface months or longer after the extreme stresses and disasters occur. So we need to construct the horizontal infrastructure that helps and sustain the community cohesion phase.
For decades to come, so we must always remember our ability to cooperate and provide mutual aid and emotional support have always been key to human survival, wellness and resilience. Here's a sample ideal transformation resilience coordinating network called well coordinated decentralization using a ring team or a hub and spoke approach.
Um, you can see that in the inner circle, there's, um, uh, that's the steering committee or leadership council, whatever the community wants to call it. Up above, you see neighborhood leaders are involved, private sector and civic leaders, youth leaders, public sector, mental health and human services, nonprofit and faith leaders.
They might elect to co chairs and elect executive committee. But outside of that, there's a number of teams working with different populations and sectors in the community. Again, upper right hand corner, there's a neighborhood resilience team, uh, working with neighborhood groups, the private sector going down to the right youth innovation teams, uh, education teams, public sector, human services, climate and disaster management, et cetera.
Uh, they're working with their own populations, but they come back and share their strategies with. The, uh, the steering committee, uh, and, uh, they get feedback if they're not, uh, if they're forgetting something or getting not, not, uh, dealing with the whole population and they share and they try to, uh, uh, strategize effective fundraising strategies.
So, why do we need this? Well, coordinated decentralization, because without this, there are often disconnected groups. That are working on siloed issues, sometimes undermining each other, sometimes competing for attention and funding, and sometimes not backing us up, and not providing everyone with the mutual aid and emotional support needed to help people survive and remain healthy and resilient, and learn from adversities, adapt, and engage in needed transformation.
So we must cooperate in new and expanded ways to respond to the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis. So here's a few examples of U. S. based resilience coordinating networks. The North Carolina Smart Start Healthy and Resilient Community Initiative is one. We're going to hear from Mevan Boyd in a few seconds about this program.
Virginia has 32, uh, uh, trauma informed community networks building resilience to prevent and mitigate the impacts of trauma in the community. Peace for Tarpon in Tarpon Springs, Florida is now called the first trauma informed community in the U. S. There is a number of many examples of international initiatives.
They're mostly called Community Based Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Networks, Interagency Standing Committee. Definition of this is a community based MHPSS approach, which individuals, communities and social systems at the center of the intervention in all phases of the response. And another one is Neighbor Services.
Neighboring services up in Edmonton, Canada. I put that on there because you're going to hear from Howard Lawrence, uh, who coordinates this effort during next week's community practice. Only a few of these initiatives describe their work as a public health approach, but that's what they're doing. They each start and seek to address issues that are present in their community and they expand from there.
There is, they are all unique. There is no one size fits all approach. None address all the five foundational protective factors we will discuss next week's community practice, not today. And only a few are explicitly focused on the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis. But they show how community is medicine.
And if those not focused on the climate catastrophe expand to address it and thousands of new initiatives are launched, we can build universal capacity for transformation resilience. Uh, the first step in doing this is to organize a steering committee. Uh, with a vision and a mission, and then beyond that, once that steering committee is organized, they go on to begin to build capacity and implement strategies to build resilience.
Today, we're going to focus just on how to get organized and next week's community practice. We're going to focus on the content. This today's focused on the structure. Uh, so with that, I don't want to interviews. Um, Mevan Boyd, uh, it's my honor to have Mevan with us. She's a resilient community officer from North Carolina Smart Start Healthy and Resilient Community Initiative.
Um, and there we go. There's Mevan. How are you? I think you're on mute. Hi, everybody. Nice to be here with you. So I asked Mevan to come on just to share, uh, what her program's doing, how they got organized, etc. So, and we're just going to do an interview. So, uh, Nevin, how, can you tell me, just tell everybody what your committee, your program's doing, how it evolved, and, and what, what's up?
Yeah, so our, the Healthy and Resilient Communities Initiative, I'm going to call it HRCI from now on because that's long, um, is funded by a private, uh, foundation, the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust, and they have funded this initiative for a total of six years. And, um, we have worked over the course of that time to do a few things.
Um, one is to learn from the many. Um, there are many coalitions across North Carolina who are doing this work about what's working, what's not working, just as importantly, like being able to share, yeah, we tried that and it did not work, or, you know, we learned from that, like that was not the best way to get law enforcement to the table or whatever, just learning from one another, um, doing what we can to align our efforts, knowing that communities are different, you And are going to have different needs, but at the same time, how can we do something similarly so that we're not reinventing the wheel, that we're speaking some of the same language across our state, and then also co creating resources.
That communities asked for and felt like they needed in order to do their work better to increase their capacity. So those were our three goals that were funded by our, our funder and some of the things, some of the resources we created were a website. ResilientNorthCarolina. org. That's all spelled out.
I can put that in the chat in a minute. And that included a glossary of terms. We put contact information of different coalition members. Some of the coalition folks are on this call. It's nice to see their, their names here. We offered, we have a resource library on that website. We have a shared calendar.
We've also done trainings and brought together a peer network once a month. Everybody comes together just to talk about a topic. Um, and then we do a monthly newsletter. So those are the kinds of things we've done with with this project. Um, from Kate, we call KBR, our funder. Thank you, Mevan. How did those community networks come together?
But can you just do a brief description of that? Yeah. And in North Carolina, there was a lot of energy around the movie Resilience. I don't know why that had such a large pickup in our state, but, um, even when the movie, the film Resilience, which was, came out in 2016, And when you watch it now, it feels a little dated.
Um, in fact, it has, uh, Kamala Harris on there as a, um, attorney general. So that's, you know, how far back it goes. But some of the work that was happening in California around, um, ACEs, education, adverse childhood experiences, really, um, energized North Carolina to say, okay, now that we know this. about the study, which came out in 1998, by the way, but it did not get picked up.
People didn't understand its significance, at least in our state, until about a decade ago. So, um, there was a lot of energy around sharing information about ACEs. Also, North Carolina, especially the eastern part of North Carolina, is very prone to natural disasters. We have had 10 hurricanes in the last 10 years.
I guess if we count what just happened 3 weeks ago, it's 11 and this one in particular. Talk about not, um, not knowing who's vulnerable to hurricanes. This one was a real eye opener for so many of us. Um, even those of us involved in in disaster response or disaster preparedness. And, and Bob, in one of your earlier slides, you had, um, who is vulnerable, our understanding of that is flawed.
And it really made me think about how we see also another take on that word is that we see as a society, people who are vulnerable. As flawed people and and we have got to and and and I think our coalitions around North Carolina have done a really good job of saying, No, it's, it's not our systems, or it's not our people that are flawed it's our systems that are flawed, and we got a lot of pushback.
from people doing resilience education saying, stop telling us to be more resilient, stop oppressing us instead. You know, so, so we, um, a lot of our coalitions around the state began to look at the, um, we created a graphic. I'm going to share my screen really quick and show this graphic that we created. Um, we called this the, the four realms of ACEs.
And I need to get this up so slideshow, you can see it better, um, where, where our coalitions were focused at first was on adverse childhood experiences. And we learned that those adverse childhood experiences don't live in a vacuum, that they are in communities that have, I hope you can see, um, the text, um, poverty and violence, poor housing quality, discrimination, lack of social capital.
And we recently added on this route on to the far right, gun violence, which is now the number one killer of children in North Carolina. So, knowing we, we can't, when we, um, we can't isolate these different traumas, that they're all related. If you don't have quality housing, when there's an adverse climate experience, It's going to affect families without good housing more than it's going to affect families with a stable roof on their home or who don't live in a floodplain because that's the only place they could afford to buy a home.
When we make a difference in food security, somebody was saying that that makes a difference in adverse childhood experiences and also our response to adverse climate events. And then also, finally, and, and importantly, um, we added a fourth ace, a fourth realm of ace is atrocious cultural experiences that look at the, um, history of oppression of people of color.
And in our nation, and, um, that these traumas, even though slavery, um, happened years ago, that the trauma of that experience continues to live on in the bodies of people in our communities whose ancestors experienced those traumas. So, so wanting to look at all of this holistically became a big change for our coalitions across North Carolina.
That was a long answer. Well, that was great. That was perfect. Um, how do these, uh, local community groups come together, these resilience networks? Um, what are the steps that people take to get them organized? So there are a few learnings. So prior to my current position, I worked as the director of the new Hanover County Resiliency Task Force, and ours developed out of a screening of that film.
But what we did. People said, we've got to do something. It's sort of like you look for that feeling, right? So hopefully people on this call are saying we've got to do something like you're already there. And what you do with that in our case was to look for the people, look for allies. and look for allies that can bring other people.
And in our case, we had a judge in our community and a district attorney who were really, um, uh, touched by the film, Ace, um, Resilience, and, um, They're the kind of people that if they're at the meeting, other people will, would come, like people would say, well, is Judge Corpening going to be there at this next meeting?
And I'd say, yes, Judge Corpening is going to be there. And sure enough, they'd show up, they'd come to that meeting. So who are your allies? Who do you know that can draw people? And, and a big mistake we made in New Hanover County when we got started was not looking for community leaders. who were not employed as a community leader, if that makes sense.
So if, if I had to do it all over again and go back to 2018, I would look for those people who live, who, they're the, the grandmas, or they're the people in a community that people go to to get information, you know, who's plugged in, who goes to all the PTA meetings, who are the people who, um, when they speak, people listen, um, and only you know who those people are.
It depends on your community where the leaders are. And so, so getting those people into a room together and say, this is what we know, how do we get started? And the second learning is don't wait till you have everybody to get started, because if you wait, you'll never get started, because by the time you wait for everybody to get there, some of the people who've been waiting on the sidelines to get started will say, well, I've gotten involved in this other board now, and I'm, I can't commit to this group.
So if you have a core group of five, six people from different. Sectors is, is, is really important that you don't just bring together people who are in K 12 education, for example, get some folks from law enforcement, get some folks from, um, health care, mental health. Those are obvious ones, but business, um, the arts community is a really good one to reach out to because they can think, they think about things in a different way and they have context.
And they can, they know how to express what's happening, um, in a community in a different way that'll be seen. Um, so I think those are my sort of how to get started, um, ideas. Great. Thank you for that. One final question, just very briefly, sort of picking up on what you just said. If you were going to recommend to the people who are on the Zoom call here, how to get started, what were the first two or three steps they should, they can take to start organizing a resilience network in their neighborhood or community.
So I, again, I would go back to who are your people? Make a list, you know, who, who do you know in, um, do you have somebody who knows a police officer? Do you have somebody who knows, um, a firefighter? Do you have somebody who knows, Um, or, or do you know, um, somebody who works, um, at a child care center? I, it's so important not to forget about children and especially children before they get to kindergarten, which often are neglected and planning.
We always think about, um, children as somehow like they appear at five years old at kindergarten, like what have they been doing all that time before they're five? Um, Forming their brains and forming the, um, the foundation for who they're going to be. And so you've got to have them at the table. Um, so Bob, I would, I would just go back to your list, get your list.
And, um, Susan, your question about staff and local government. Yes, yes, yes. That would be amazing. Um, most, um, local governments have somebody who's in charge of disaster response. Um, see if you can get a hold of, of that person or somebody within their, um, their office if it's a big enough county. United Way is a great idea.
Um, you guys know, you know who to invite. Yes, Red Cross, but just be sure that you are not only concentrating on disaster response people, because then it's going to become a group of disaster, um, just disaster people who can't, who don't have connections to the different sectors that you need to have there to really be a multi sector organization.
Faith communities, absolutely. And they are really picking up the ball in Western North Carolina. Um, you know, they have resources often that are underutilized. Um, some of it, some churches only get used on Sundays. You got six days a week where you've got buildings and resources that aren't, aren't used.
Thank you so much for this information. Uh, if people have other questions, post them in chat. I don't know if we'll get to them today, but we'll be able to pass these on and probably try to get back to you all later. Um, so I really want to thank you. I want to just follow up on one quick term. The term resilience, we actually did our own study about it a while back.
What you should do in your community is use whatever term. Resonates with the local population. If the term resilience doesn't resonate, use something else. Um, and go ask people to describe the dynamics you're trying to describe and want to want to capture and see what what terms throw out some ideas, et cetera.
Uh, so, uh, there's lots of ways to communicate about this. There's no one single way. Whatever resonates with the people you work with is really going to be key. And that's key for for the whole presentation. So thank you, Bevan. We appreciate that. And I just, I do just want to, um, Selena, I see on this call and Scotty, Takara, there, there's some folks that are doing amazing things in North Carolina who will be a great resource to you all as you create this cohort.
Okay.
So I want to just say a few more words and then we're going to go back into breakout rooms and you can talk about what you just heard. But. So, following up on what Meben just said, how can you form a new Transformation Resilience Coordinating Network? Again, call it whatever you want, um, uh, form a small planning group, identify some people that, as Meben was talking about, uh, and develop an initial vision of success and mission.
What are you trying to achieve? So there's some clear clarity about that. You can then create an elevator speech as we talk about it, which is a short one minute talk. If you were going to explain what you're trying to do in 30 seconds to a minute to a person, what would it be? Uh, and then go out and share it with those other people, uh, and continue the process.
As Mevan said, start small. You got six or five or six, great. You can get up to 12, 10 or 12. Uh, see if you can get, get up to, uh, get, get a larger group, uh, hold meetings. Uh, spend time getting to know what everybody's interested in and developing camaraderie, uh, and then develop an expanded mission and vision by including their ideas, their comments, the, you know, you have your small initial group and, uh, add to that.
And when you get a broader group together, uh, ask them to form your initial steering committee or leadership council or whatever it is you want to call it, uh, to oversee the initiative and give it a name. Uh, if you're working with a program, you might already have a name that you can, uh, the existing organization, but, uh, Um, you know, and it can take a couple of months.
Sometimes these happen very quickly. Sometimes they happen, uh, uh, uh, it takes a little longer. If you want to expand an existing organization or network to become a resilience coordinating network, um, talk with other members of your group about expanding to become a Uh, TRNC does and address the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis.
As Ed Meben said, there are many different traumas that are associated with this. It's not just the disaster. So it's not a disaster management program. You are building resilience for all sorts of stresses and traumas. Uh, and again, develop an initial vision and mission and vision of success. What are you trying to achieve?
Um, what do you want to achieve? Develop a short elevator speech to describe it and share it to other, uh, team members or organizational members, uh, to secure their support, uh, uh, and identic as Nevin said, go out and try to identify other organizations that work with or represent other key populations and sectors in the community.
Share your vision and mission. Uh, and try to include them and expand to the number of people over time, you can start very small and just over time and, uh, continue to expand it hold meetings again, spend time getting to know everyone's interest in their focus, develop camaraderie, and then create an expanded mission and vision and maybe a new name.
Maybe not. Maybe you've already got an organization name. Everybody thinks that's fine.
And when you have an expanded steering committee, that is to say, you're now. Beyond your specific organization, you're doing more work, uh, with a vision and a mission of what you're trying to do. Let the community know it and invite additional people to participate.
So it's just a matter of continue to grow it. Um, some important actions, uh, for the initial, for the steering committee or network, whatever you want to call it, take time to build trust and explicitly practice good communications. Decision making and conflict resolution skills. We've worked with a number of groups that actually play games to practice how they're going to resolve conflicts because each group has its own perspective, the funding needs, etc.
So there's, there's going to be conflicts. And take time to decide on the values that you're going to operate by and the operating principles and even the initial organizational structure. Do you want an executive committee? Do you want to elect co chairs? Do you want to have these resilience innovation teams working with different, whatever it might be, just some time, spend some time talking about it, but educate everyone involved with the resilience network, all the steering committee members, Residents, groups and organizations that are interested about what it is you're trying to do what the TRC on seeks to do.
And again, continue to invite other people in the community to attend meetings, watch the process, and over time, it's very likely to continue to expand participation. So, here's just a form. We don't have to fill it out now, but. Uh, you can decide here's, you know, if you want to form a new, uh, transformation of Zain's coordinating network, you can sort of list one to three grassroots neighborhood or civic leaders you can talk with about it, or one to three neighborhood, private or public sector leaders you can talk with.
Or you could use the opposite if you're trying to expand an existing group or network to become a resilience network, uh, specifically for the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis. Just try to identify one to three people, uh, that within the group already that you can talk with about this. So I'll leave you to you to work on that on your own.
So let's go into breakout rooms. Now, Jesse's going to immediately put you into a three to five person breakout room and for 30 seconds or so, just introduce yourself. Okay. And then as a group to Scott, discuss what you heard today and what you heard from Eben. And if you can see a way to engage in what you just heard, some barriers you might face, get feedback in different ways to overcome those barriers.
And then if you would put, please put your key points and questions in chat, we'll follow up with that. So I'm going to turn it over to Jesse to break you up into breakout rooms. See you in 10 minutes. Appreciate it. Bob, uh, opening up the breakout rooms now. Christian just posted those questions. Bob went over in the chat.
We look forward to seeing everybody in about 10 minutes. Thank you.
Welcome back, everybody. Sorry, my slides are not doing well here. Um, if you have some questions that came out of the community of practice, can you put them in chat? Um, and Christian's going to read a few. Um, Christian, you, sir, the one we talked about, can you Yeah, excellent. Uh, we had a question earlier that Mebane spoke to a little bit, but maybe worth diving back in.
Um, what about including local government in your TRC and development? And that's a great question. I, and I think Mebane gave the right answer. Uh, in part, in the sense that if the local community trusts the local government, by all means, include them. If they don't trust the local government, then be careful, um, be very, uh, either find somebody that works with a local government agency that people trust, uh, or don't include them for a while, uh, and then just to make it the private sector, the public and non profit, civic sector, faith leaders, et cetera, et cetera.
And then, uh, they can, uh, have them, the local governments can observe that, et cetera. So it really depends on the relationship the community has with local government leaders. Any other question? Yeah, we actually have a couple questions regarding funding. We, um, spoke to some best practices for organizing our TRCNs, but, uh, what about potential funding to support them?
Do we have any ideas for startup funding for these networks? Uh, we don't want to have to ask, especially the community leaders who have to volunteer their time to be part of this network to rally funding. Um, any points in that regard? Yeah, very good question. Thank you. Um, each community is going to be different.
Um, but, uh, I think that initially, uh, our recommendation and what we've seen with many of the others that start is to try to go get funds, secure funds from local donors, local members. Do a little potlucks and fundraising in that way, just to sort of build the effort, because it's hard for major funders of any kind to give funding to a brand new group.
They want to see progress. They want to see what it's like. So try to get some funding together from private citizens, local members, etc. Then maybe reach out if there is a, a small local philanthropic organization, reach out to them. Uh, it might be United Way, if that exists in your community, if it's a U.
S., but it could be another donor, private donor, whatever, uh, and build from there. Uh, but we also recommend that, um, communities and states think about establishing their own funding mechanisms. So we have promoted in the U. S. the Community Mental Wellness and Resilience Act. Uh, that would have the federal government through the Center for Disease Control and Prevention directly funding community initiatives.
We'll see how it goes. We got close, but didn't get close enough to get a hearing on it this Congress. We'll see how things go in the election, whether we can get a hearing on it next Congress, and if can, I think we can pass it. Um, but that would just be one step, but each state or province, uh, and each nation should create their own funding mechanisms for these, but go directly to the community.
Uh, and the way the Community Mental Wellness and Resilience Act is organized, Is a non profit serves as a fiscal sponsor for the resilience network. They can take in the funds, but they do not run the network that's run by the community members that are involved. Uh, so the difference between community led and community based, these need to be as much as possible community led.
But you can take funding in from outside through a fiscal sponsor that, uh, then the steering committee decides how those funds are used. Um, so there's a lot of different strata when. We're just or we organize this two part community practice to give you an overview of how to organize and operate these, uh, resilience networks.
Um, if you become a, uh, perspective network, that means you're decided you're going to organize a group in your community or you're already got a steering committee and you become an emerging network. I'll talk about that in a second. Um, there we're going to give you handbooks. On how to do this kind of work and there's a lot more information in the handbooks about how to do fundraising who to involve Um in your network, etc.
And all of that is based on the work of mebane's group and many many other Initiatives around that we've just tried to take and integrate into one framework. So, um, So you'll you'll get a lot of information about that. Let's take one other quick question and then we'll wrap up All right, next on my list is how do we engage our area disaster response in this dialogue that helps bridge connections?
It's a great question. Again, you don't want to make it a disaster management program. That disaster management should be one of the focuses, um, but, uh, just, uh, if, if they're, often there's a real, siloing between the two, between disaster management and building mental wellness and community resilience, et cetera.
So just invite them to participate or observe meetings. Go, go share what you're doing, but invite them to participate and watch for a while. And often somebody in that organization will get the idea. Oh, this could be very beneficial and we'll start participating. So just give them time, but invite them to, to watch and observe and see progress.
And usually when people see progress, that's when they say, Oh, that would be beneficial for us. We should engage also. So, uh, again, there's many other questions. If you just post them in chat, we'll try to respond to them afterwards. Uh, I want to wrap up now. I can get this to go correctly. Um, uh, so in the, um, in the, we're going to send you the slides.
Uh, after this is over with the recording of the session, but in the slides that we're not going to have time to go into, there's information about communicating with residents, excluding skeptics. That you can look at, um, because sometimes they go, well, how do we, how do we engage people in organizations that are skeptical of the climate ecosystem, biodiversity crisis or other issues?
Uh, and so you'll be able to see some information in there. Not sure why this is not working now. Um, so there'd be three, three different, um, but I want to end by saying that if you engage people. In resilience or regeneration, that means restoring systems in your community, you're likely to create positive identities.
And what I mean by that is, we humans tend to continually test out and assume different types of identities, especially youth. So helping people engage in, uh, resilience building by providing mutual aid or emotional support to others, or participating in external physical resilience building activities, And or participating in re in in regeneration by enhancing getting involved with enhancing local conditions, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, caring for force and waterways and restoring them or animals is likely to move many people to form their identity around this work, because it can be very rewarding, even when it is hard and seeing progress builds hope.
It also gives people a sense that they belong and are important, and it gives them meaning in their lives by engaging something larger than themselves. So what we have seen is the more you can engage people in building resilience, whatever term you want to use for that, or re engagement, should now be woven into everything we do, given what's happening with the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis, especially for youth.
And again, you'll get much more of it about these and information about these and much more interest to your questions, I think, in the handbook purpose perspective transformation resistance courting network that will send you if you decide you want to be that. So let me now talk about our initiative.
The high level climate champion race to resilience initiatives to help form and operate transformation resilience coordinating networks globally. If you do not have a local steering transformation resilience network together, you can come to us. You can apply on our website to form a new one. Or if you already have a coalition organization, you want to expand it.
Uh, to address the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis. You can apply there. We will designate your group as a prospective Transformation Resilience Network, uh, and we'll provide you with this handbook I just talked about. We'll start providing technical assistance and involve you in a community practice with other organizations that are focused on forming a wide and diverse steering committee and developing a clear mission, vision, goals, and operating procedures.
Um, once you become have a steering committee and have a clear vision and mission, uh, mission, uh, develop, uh, and you're now ready to develop a strategy to build population level transformation resilience, we will invite you to become an emerging Transformation Resilience Coordinating Network. Um, again, this is after a steering committee is formed, or if you already have one formed.
And again, we'll provide you a separate handbook with lots of information about and technical assistance and involve you in a community of practice to help you learn how to develop a strategy to build population level mental wellness and transformational resilience. Um, so something to consider before next Tuesday's community practice.
Today, we focused on the structural elements. How do you organize the social infrastructure in your community that we call a TRNC to build population level mental wellness and resilience? Next week we're going to focus on the content. What does that mean? What would you actually do in the community? Um, but before that, if you're have time and you're interested, develop your own strategy to form a Transformation Resilience Coordinated Network, form a new one, or expand an existing group to become a TRCN, uh, to address the climate crisis.
So outline your mission, And your vision of success for your local community. Just, you know, write it down on a piece of paper, just briefly develop a one minute elevator speech to try to describe it, help helps to try to say it out loud. Uh, and then you get clear on what you're trying to do and think of two or three people you can share this with and hold a discussion and ask them, but they will help you get there.
Form a transformation resilience coordinating network. And then next Tuesday's session is going to focus on, uh, how to use a public health approach to implement the five foundational protective factors our research determined will be essential to build population level mental wellness and transformation resilience.
Uh, and Howard Lawrence is going to join us. Uh, to talk about his program. He's the coordinator of neighborhood services in Edmonton, Canada, doing some really exciting work around the first foundational protective factor. That's really vital. And that is to, uh, build social connections across boundaries in the communities.
Just a summary of what we talked about today, the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis is a rapidly accelerating event that in different times, ways and magnitudes will severely stress or traumatize everyone. This means we now have two urgent tasks in front of us, build the horizontal infrastructure in our communities to engage residents and providing the mutual aid and emotional support needed to help them survive.
And remain healthy and resilient to the long during the long climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis, while also motivating residents to do their part to reduce the crisis to manageable levels and enhance local conditions. And we believe that Transformation Resilience Core Networks are the most effective way to build and sustain this social infrastructure that's needed to accomplish this.
Um, and they're mostly organized by a few willing people in their community who are And you can do it. So just to reiterate again to remember the key message. Community is medicine. Throughout human history, our ability to band together and cooperate has always been key to providing the mutual aid emotional support needed to help people survive, remain healthy and resilient during crisis and solve complex problems.
And by organizing transformational resilience courting networks in our neighbors and communities. Now we can do this again for the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis. Well, thank you for attending today's session. You will get a recording of this session, um, as well as the slides, um, in the next day or so, and then, uh, we'll meet next week and to hear more diving into the content of what it means to build transformational resilience.
Um, so with that, I want to say thank you and wish you all a very good week and hope to see most of you or all of you next week. And thank you again, Meben, uh, for your, uh, taking the time to be with us today. Take care of everybody. Bye bye.
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