SDS 355R: Resilience and Social Support

Estimated study time: 1 hr 1 min

Table of contents

University of Waterloo — Spring 2021 Instructor: Dr. Jim Perretta

Module 1: Positive Psychology and the Strengths-Based Model

Introduction to the Course

This course is built on a deceptively simple but powerful premise: every human being, no matter what circumstances they face, possesses strengths that can be identified, cultivated, and mobilized. SDS 355R examines resilience and social support from multiple levels of analysis — individual, family, community, and cultural — drawing on the science of positive psychology, developmental research, and social work practice. The goal is not merely to understand human suffering, but to understand what enables people to thrive despite adversity.

Resilience can be defined as the capacity of individuals and systems to adapt successfully in the context of significant adversity, threat, or trauma. It is not a fixed trait but a dynamic process — one that unfolds across time, shaped by the interaction between a person and their environment. This social-ecological understanding of resilience, championed by researchers such as Michael Ungar and Urie Bronfenbrenner, is a cornerstone of this course. Ungar conceptualizes resilience across five nested levels: individual factors (positive emotions, self-efficacy, self-regulation), relationship factors (mentors, social support), community factors (education, safety, employment), cultural factors (spiritual and cultural identity, life philosophy), and physical ecology factors (green spaces, sustainable resources). Understanding resilience means understanding all of these layers simultaneously.

Positive Psychology

Positive psychology emerged formally in 1998 when Martin Seligman, then president of the American Psychological Association, called on the field to supplement its nearly exclusive focus on pathology with the scientific study of human flourishing. Joined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Seligman articulated a vision in which psychology would concern itself not only with repairing what is broken, but with building what is best in people and institutions. The foundational paper they published together in 2000 in American Psychologist launched a generation of research into topics such as happiness, meaning, character strengths, and resilience.

It is important to distinguish positive psychology from pop psychology. Where pop psychology trades in unsupported platitudes and self-help clichés, positive psychology is a rigorous scientific enterprise. Its claims are tested empirically, replicated across cultures, and subjected to the same methodological scrutiny as any other area of psychological science. As Christopher Peterson (2009) memorably stated, “Positive psychology will rise or fall on the science on which it is based.” This commitment to evidence is something every practitioner and researcher in this field must keep front and centre — particularly when working with vulnerable populations who deserve accurate information, not false hope.

The Strengths-Based Model

The strengths-based model represents a deliberate shift in focus from deficits to assets, from what is wrong with a person to what is right. Two key frameworks have shaped this approach. The first is Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi’s positive psychology project, which treats flourishing as a legitimate object of scientific inquiry. The second is the work of Peterson, who developed the Values in Action (VIA) Inventory of Strengths, a validated psychometric tool that identifies 24 character strengths organized under six broad virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.

Hart and Sasso (2011) offer a critical assessment that is worth examining honestly. They argue that positive psychology is sometimes presented as if it were revolutionary, when in fact many of its core ideas — the importance of meaning, purpose, social connection, and growth — appear throughout the history of humanistic and existential psychology. Furthermore, Hart and Sasso caution against what they call the “tyranny of the positive”: a cultural pressure to always look on the bright side, which can pathologize normal sadness, grief, and negative emotion. Genuine resilience is not about suppressing dark feelings; it is about developing the capacity to process them without being overwhelmed. This nuance is essential for practitioners who must avoid imposing a cheerfulness agenda on clients who are legitimately suffering.

The VIA strengths inventory has been administered to millions of people worldwide. Research consistently finds that using one’s signature strengths — those character strengths that feel most natural and authentic — in new ways on a daily basis produces measurable increases in happiness and decreases in depressive symptoms. However, as Hart and Sasso remind us, the strengths-based model must be applied with cultural sensitivity and clinical judgment, never as a one-size-fits-all prescription.

One of the most important conceptual moves in resilience research has been the shift from viewing resilience as a personal trait to understanding it as a relational and contextual process. Michael Ungar (2011) defines resilience through two interrelated processes: navigation — the individual’s capacity to find pathways to the psychological, social, cultural, and physical resources that sustain their well-being — and negotiation — the collective capacity of families, communities, and cultures to provide those resources in meaningful ways. This definition immediately implicates the environment as an active agent in resilience, not merely a backdrop for individual coping. A child growing up in a safe, well-resourced neighbourhood with responsive caregivers and culturally coherent institutions has access to very different resilience-building inputs than a child in a community ravaged by poverty, racism, and disinvestment. Acknowledging this is not defeatism; it is honesty about the conditions under which individual strengths can flourish or be suppressed.

Ungar’s framework draws on Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, which maps human development across nested contexts: the microsystem (immediate relationships and settings), the mesosystem (connections between microsystems), the exosystem (broader social structures that affect the person indirectly), and the macrosystem (the broad cultural and institutional environment). For practitioners in social work, social development, and allied fields, this framework demands that interventions be designed at every level of the ecology — not just at the level of individual cognition or behaviour.

Module 2: Longitudinal Studies and Assessment Tools

The Kauai Longitudinal Study

No study has done more to establish the empirical foundations of resilience research than Emmy Werner’s four-decade longitudinal study of children born on the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 1955. Werner and her colleagues followed every child born in that year into adulthood, tracking those who grew up in conditions of significant adversity — poverty, family instability, parental psychopathology, perinatal stress. The central finding, reported across publications spanning decades, was striking: approximately one-third of the high-risk children grew up to become competent, confident, and caring adults without any professional intervention. These individuals became the first generation to be studied systematically under the label “resilient.”

What distinguished these children? Werner identified a constellation of protective factors across three domains. At the individual level, resilient children tended to be easy-going as infants (low reactivity, positive affect), intellectually capable, possessed of a sense of humour, and in possession of what Werner called internal locus of control — a belief that their own actions could influence outcomes. At the family level, the most critical factor was having at least one stable, caring adult — not necessarily a parent — who was unconditionally committed to the child. This finding anticipated the later emphasis on attachment and the importance of even a single reliable mentor or caregiver. At the community level, access to social support networks — churches, community groups, neighbours — provided additional buffering.

Werner’s work introduced the concept of sensitive periods: windows of development during which certain experiences have especially powerful and lasting effects. It also demonstrated the principle of developmental cascades — early positive or negative experiences set in motion chains of subsequent events that amplify over time. A child who develops secure attachment is more likely to succeed in school, which opens doors to higher education and stable employment, which creates conditions for raising the next generation with more resources. Adversity, conversely, tends to compound itself through cascades in the opposite direction. Werner’s work is a compelling argument for early intervention.

The documentary Lost Boys of Sudan illustrates the concepts from the Kauai study with vivid, emotionally immediate power.

Project Competence

Ann Masten and colleagues at the University of Minnesota undertook a parallel long-term study called Project Competence, tracking children from middle childhood through adulthood with particular attention to what it means to be doing well in the face of adversity. Masten defines resilience not as the absence of suffering but as positive adaptation within the context of significant adversity — a definition that requires two independent judgments: that the person has faced genuine risk, and that their functioning meets culturally relevant standards of competence.

One of Masten’s most important contributions is her argument that resilience is largely built from ordinary magic — not extraordinary heroism or exceptional resources, but the activation of basic, normative human adaptive systems. These include the cognitive systems supported by healthy brain development, the attachment system sustained by responsive caregiving, the agency system that develops through mastery experiences, the meaning-making systems of culture and religion, and the regulatory systems that govern attention and emotion. When these ordinary systems function adequately, most children — even those facing significant adversity — show remarkable recovery. The implication for intervention is both humbling and empowering: we do not need to create extraordinary programs if we can protect and activate the ordinary systems that are already there.

Masten also articulated the concept of four waves of resilience research. The first wave focused on identifying risk and protective factors through correlational studies. The second wave moved toward process-oriented research asking how and why protective factors operate. The third wave incorporated neurobiological and genetic perspectives, examining how biological systems interact with experience. The fourth, emerging wave involves a systems perspective and translational research that links basic science to practical intervention. This course draws on all four waves.

Assessment Tools for Resilience

A practitioner’s understanding of resilience is only as useful as their ability to measure it reliably and validly. Several instruments have been developed for this purpose, each reflecting particular theoretical assumptions about what resilience is and how it should be operationalized.

The Resilience Scale for Children (RSC) and its companion instruments for adolescents and adults — developed by Gail Wagnild and Heather Young — are among the most widely used. These scales conceptualize resilience as encompassing personal competence (self-reliance, independence, determination) and acceptance of self and life (adaptability, balance, flexibility, and a philosophical perspective). The Resilience Scale for Adolescents (READ) further specifies five factors: personal competence, social competence, structured style, family cohesion, and social resources — capturing both individual and relational dimensions.

The Personal Strengths Inventory, informed by the VIA framework, assesses character strengths that contribute to resilience. The VIA classification system, developed by Peterson and Seligman, identifies 24 strengths ranging from creativity and curiosity to kindness and gratitude. Importantly, positive psychology research suggests that awareness and use of one’s signature strengths predicts well-being above and beyond the absence of psychopathology — a finding directly relevant to the Two-Factor Model of Mental Health that this course returns to repeatedly.

Assessment should never be a one-directional act of measurement; it should be the beginning of a collaborative conversation with a client about their history of surviving difficult circumstances, the resources they have drawn on, and the strengths that characterize them even when symptoms are active. The assessor’s orientation — whether they primarily see deficits or assets — shapes what they find and what they report back to the client.

Module 3: Traumatic Events and Resilience Trajectories

Potentially Traumatic Events

Potentially Traumatic Events (PTEs) is a term coined by researchers to acknowledge that exposure to adverse events does not automatically produce psychological trauma. Whether an event becomes traumatic for a given individual depends on a complex interaction of factors: the nature and severity of the event itself, the person’s prior history, their available coping resources, and the social context of recovery. This framing is important because it avoids pathologizing normal responses to abnormal circumstances while also taking seriously the reality that some people do develop lasting difficulties following exposure to adversity.

The range of events that qualify as potentially traumatic is broad: natural disasters, accidents, violent crime, sexual assault, childhood abuse and neglect, combat, refugee experiences, loss of a loved one, serious illness, and chronic adversity such as poverty or discrimination. The COVID-19 Pandemic has expanded this landscape enormously, creating population-level exposure to grief, loss of livelihood, social isolation, health anxiety, and uncertainty. Dr. Perretta has woven the COVID-19 context throughout this course not as a special case but as a live illustration of the principles that resilience research has been documenting for decades.

Bonanno’s Four Trajectories

George Bonanno at Columbia University has contributed perhaps the most important descriptive framework for understanding how people respond to loss and trauma over time. Drawing on longitudinal studies of bereaved individuals, survivors of life-threatening illness, and New Yorkers following the September 11 attacks, Bonanno and colleagues identified four distinct resilience trajectories — patterns of functioning over time that characterize qualitatively different responses to adversity.

The resilience trajectory describes individuals who maintain relatively stable, healthy functioning throughout and after the adverse event, with perhaps a brief dip in well-being immediately following exposure. Critically, Bonanno found this pattern to be far more common than had previously been assumed — in many samples, a majority of individuals show resilience. This finding directly challenges the assumption, embedded in much clinical training, that intense grief or distress is the normal response and that the absence of prolonged distress indicates pathology (what Bonanno calls the absent grief assumption). His research showed that individuals who process loss without prolonged distress are genuinely well-adjusted, not in denial.

The recovery trajectory describes individuals who show significant disruption in functioning following adversity but who gradually return to pre-event baseline levels over months or years. This is the pattern that many clinical interventions are designed to support. The chronic dysfunction trajectory describes individuals who were already struggling prior to the adverse event and continue to struggle afterward, often due to limited resources or multiple compounding adversities. The delayed reaction trajectory describes a rarer pattern in which functioning initially appears intact but deteriorates over time — sometimes because the full weight of the loss cannot be metabolized immediately.

Understanding these trajectories has profound clinical implications. Not every person who has experienced a traumatic event needs intensive psychotherapy. Providing psychological debriefing to everyone exposed to a traumatic event — a practice once widely recommended — may actually interfere with the natural recovery process for those on the resilience or recovery trajectories. The clinical task is to accurately identify which trajectory a given client is on, and to provide the appropriate level of support accordingly.

Post-Traumatic Growth

Post-Traumatic Growth (PTG) refers to positive psychological change experienced as a result of the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances. This is not merely bouncing back to a prior baseline; it is the development of new strengths, perspectives, or relationships that would not have emerged without the adversarial experience. PTG was systematically studied by Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, who developed the Post-Traumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI), measuring growth across five domains: personal strength, relating to others, new possibilities, appreciation of life, and spiritual change.

It is essential to distinguish genuine PTG from coping that merely involves positive reframing. True growth involves a fundamental challenge to one’s assumptive world — the beliefs one holds about one’s own invulnerability, the meaningfulness of the world, and one’s sense of identity — followed by a reconstruction of those beliefs at a higher level of complexity. Not all people who experience adversity show PTG, and the presence or absence of growth is not an indicator of moral character or coping skill; it is a complex outcome shaped by factors that are only partially within any individual’s control.

A meta-analysis by Prati and Pietrantoni (2009) examined social support and PTG, finding that social support was among the strongest predictors of post-traumatic growth — stronger, even, than the severity of the trauma itself. This finding reinforces the social-ecological view of resilience and places the quality of relationships at the centre of the growth process. Practitioners who understand this research will naturally direct their interventions not only at the individual’s cognitions but at the quality of the social environment surrounding them.

Conservation of Resources Theory

Stevan Hobfoll’s Conservation of Resources (COR) Theory offers a complementary framework for understanding stress and resilience. COR theory proposes that people strive to obtain, retain, protect, and foster resources — broadly defined to include objects (material possessions), conditions (such as employment or marriage), personal characteristics (such as self-efficacy or optimism), and energies (such as time and money). Stress occurs when resources are threatened, lost, or when anticipated gains fail to materialize after significant investment.

A key insight of COR theory is the concept of resource loss spirals: because losing resources makes it harder to prevent further losses (one needs resources to acquire resources), disadvantaged individuals face a compounding spiral of loss that makes resilience increasingly difficult over time. Conversely, individuals with rich resource reservoirs can more easily sustain new losses. This has direct implications for understanding why poverty is not merely a financial condition but an existential one — the constant threat of resource loss imposes a cognitive and emotional toll that depletes the very psychological resources needed to cope with adversity.

Module 4: Individual Dimensions of Resilience

Pathways to Resilience

Pathways to resilience are the mechanisms through which protective factors exert their effects. Researchers have described several distinct pathways. Resistance involves the maintenance of adequate functioning despite exposure to adversity — some individuals simply do not show the same level of disruption that others do when facing identical stressors. Recovery involves a return to prior functioning following a period of disruption. Normalization describes an adaptation in which functioning adjusts to a new, perhaps lower, baseline that is nonetheless viable and allows the person to live a meaningful life. Transformation describes change at a deeper level — a reorganization of values, priorities, or self-concept that constitutes genuine growth.

Understanding which pathway a client is on helps practitioners calibrate their interventions. A client on a resistance pathway may need very little support and would be ill-served by intensive therapy that pathologizes their coping. A client on a recovery pathway needs time, support, and perhaps targeted skill-building. A client who has experienced devastating loss and is on a transformative pathway needs space to do the hard work of meaning-making, which cannot be rushed or bypassed.

Personality and Resilience

The relationship between personality and resilience has been extensively studied. The Big Five Personality Traits — openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism — are among the most robust predictors of resilience outcomes. High neuroticism (emotional reactivity) is consistently associated with poorer outcomes following adversity, while conscientiousness, agreeableness, and low neuroticism together form a profile that supports adaptive coping.

Jack Block introduced the concept of ego-resiliency to describe a personality disposition characterized by flexible adaptation to changing circumstances — the ability to tighten or loosen behavioural and emotional controls in response to environmental demands. Ego-resiliency is not the same as resilience (which refers to outcome), but it is a personality resource that substantially predicts who will show positive outcomes following adversity.

Kobasa’s hardiness model identifies three dimensions — commitment (the tendency to find meaning and purpose in one’s activities), control (the belief that one can influence the course of events), and challenge (the appraisal of change as an opportunity for growth rather than a threat) — as forming a pattern of personality that buffers against the ill effects of stress. Hardiness has been studied extensively in high-stress populations including military personnel, executives, and health care workers, and it shows significant associations with both physical and mental health outcomes.

Locus of control, a construct developed by Julian Rotter, describes the degree to which individuals attribute the causes of events to internal factors (their own effort and ability) versus external factors (luck, powerful others, or fate). An internal locus of control is generally associated with more active, problem-focused coping and better outcomes following adversity. However, contextual factors matter: in situations of genuine uncontrollability, an internal locus of control can become a source of self-blame and shame, and practitioners need to help clients distinguish between genuinely controllable aspects of their situation and those that are not.

Defence mechanisms, as theorized in the psychoanalytic tradition and empirically studied by George Vaillant, also contribute to resilience. Vaillant’s research demonstrated that the level of psychological maturity of the defences a person characteristically employs is a strong predictor of adult mental health and life satisfaction. Mature defences — such as humour, altruism, sublimation, and anticipation — allow people to process difficult emotions and situations in ways that preserve both their own functioning and their relationships with others, while immature defences such as projection and acting out create additional problems.

Positive Emotions and the Broaden-and-Build Theory

Barbara Fredrickson’s Broaden-and-Build Theory is among the most influential theoretical contributions of positive psychology. Fredrickson proposes that positive emotions have a distinct evolutionary function: they broaden people’s momentary thought-action repertoires, expanding the range of thoughts and actions that come to mind. This broadened awareness then builds lasting personal resources — physical, intellectual, social, and psychological. Where negative emotions narrow attention and behaviour toward immediate survival responses (fight or flight), positive emotions widen the attentional aperture and generate the kind of exploratory, playful, creative behaviour through which lasting resources are developed.

The clinical and practical implications are significant. Fredrickson has shown that positive emotions facilitate recovery from the cardiovascular sequelae of negative emotional arousal — the so-called undoing effect: positive emotions accelerate the return of heart rate, blood pressure, and vagal tone to baseline following a stressor. This effect has been observed with films of peaceful nature scenes, interactions with humorous content, and experiences of gratitude or love. For practitioners, this means that deliberately cultivating positive emotional experiences is not a luxury or a distraction from the serious business of addressing trauma and adversity; it is a direct physiological and psychological intervention.

Fredrickson also developed the concept of a positivity ratio — the idea that a certain ratio of positive to negative emotional experiences is associated with flourishing. While the specific mathematical formulation of this ratio has been challenged and retracted by Fredrickson and colleagues, the underlying insight — that positive emotional experiences are not simply the absence of negative ones, and that they contribute independently to well-being — remains robustly supported.

Savouring refers to the capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance positive experiences. Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff have studied savouring as a distinct psychological competency that can be developed through practice. Techniques include sharing positive experiences with others, mental photography (making a conscious effort to memorize the sensory details of a pleasant moment), congratulating oneself, comparing the current moment favourably to some worse alternative, and absorption — losing oneself completely in the experience. Savouring is particularly relevant for resilience because adversity tends to narrow attention toward threat, and explicitly counteracting this narrowing through mindful appreciation of positive moments is an evidence-based coping strategy.

Selective Optimization with Compensation

Paul and Margret Baltes developed the model of Selective Optimization with Compensation (SOC) to describe successful development and ageing in the face of inevitable losses in biological, psychological, and social resources. The model proposes three interacting strategies: selection (focusing energy on the domains and goals most central to one’s identity and values), optimization (investing effort to maximize functioning in those selected domains), and compensation (adopting new means of achieving goals when prior means are no longer available).

The pianist Arthur Rubinstein famously illustrates all three processes: in old age, he reduced his repertoire (selection), practised the chosen pieces more intensively (optimization), and played the fast passages in slow pieces even slower to create a contrast effect that maintained the impression of speed (compensation). SOC theory is especially relevant for understanding resilience in older adults and individuals with chronic illness, where losses are real and adaptation requires genuine creativity and flexibility rather than denial.

Spirituality and Religion

The relationship between spirituality, religion, and resilience is one of the most empirically well-supported findings in the field. Kenneth Pargament, a leading researcher in the psychology of religion, has spent decades documenting how religious belief and practice function as resources for coping with adversity. Religious coping can take multiple forms, which Pargament categorizes along several dimensions. Positive religious coping includes strategies such as seeking spiritual support from God or one’s religious community, benevolent religious reappraisal (seeing the adverse event as part of a divine plan), and collaborative coping (a sense of working together with God to address the problem). Negative religious coping includes spiritual struggle — questioning God’s justice, feeling abandoned by God, or experiencing demonic appraisals of adversity — which is associated with poorer mental and physical health outcomes.

The Brief RCOPE, a short measure of religious coping developed by Pargament and colleagues, has been widely used in clinical and research settings. It distinguishes the positive and negative forms of religious coping and has been validated across a wide range of populations and adversities, from medical illness to natural disasters to bereavement. The finding that religious coping predicts outcomes above and beyond the effects of general social support suggests that spiritual beliefs and practices engage meaning-making processes that are genuinely distinct from simply having people to talk to.

Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz and developed Logotherapy, argued that the fundamental human motivation is the will to meaning — the drive to find or create meaning in one’s existence. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl describes how those who survived the concentration camps were often those who maintained a sense of purpose or a reason to live — a person waiting for them, a work to complete, a mission they believed only they could accomplish. Frankl proposed that even in the most extreme suffering, human beings retain the freedom to choose their attitude — what he called the last of the human freedoms.

Irvin Yalom, an existential psychiatrist and psychotherapist, has articulated four ultimate concerns that he argues constitute the core of existential anxiety: death, freedom (and the accompanying responsibility of authorship of one’s own life), isolation (the unbridgeable gap between self and other), and meaninglessness. Yalom’s existential psychotherapy addresses these concerns directly, helping clients develop a genuine and personal relationship with each of them rather than avoiding their confrontation through neurotic compromise. For resilience, Yalom’s framework suggests that facing — rather than fleeing from — the existential realities of human life is itself a source of strength and authenticity.

Social support is consistently among the strongest predictors of resilience outcomes across the lifespan and across diverse adversities. The literature distinguishes among several types of social support. Emotional support involves expressions of empathy, care, and love — the experience of being understood and valued. Instrumental support involves tangible assistance: help with tasks, financial aid, physical care. Informational support involves the provision of advice, guidance, and relevant information that helps a person navigate a problem. Appraisal support involves feedback that helps a person evaluate a situation accurately.

The mechanisms through which social support operates are multiple. The buffering hypothesis proposes that social support does not affect health directly but rather moderates the relationship between stress and health outcomes — it protects against the damaging effects of high-stress conditions but has little effect when stress is low. The direct effects hypothesis proposes that social support is beneficial regardless of stress level, perhaps through its effects on neuroendocrine systems, immune function, health behaviours, and sense of belonging. Both mechanisms have empirical support, and the distinction between them has implications for intervention: if buffering is primary, targeting support to high-stress populations is most efficient; if direct effects are primary, broad support-building initiatives benefit everyone.

The quality of social support matters as much as its quantity. Perceived support — the belief that support would be available if needed — is often a stronger predictor of outcomes than received support — the actual support one has received. This may seem paradoxical, but it reflects the reality that actually receiving support can carry costs: acknowledgment of dependency, disruption of reciprocity norms, and the relational strain of placing heavy demands on others. Perceived support, by contrast, confers a sense of security and belonging without these costs.

Module 6: Midterm Paper and Class Participation Journal

Module 6 is an assessment week. There is no new lecture content in this module. Students submit the Midterm Paper (6–7 pages, double-spaced, approximately 1600 words) to the Midterm Paper Dropbox, applying theoretical knowledge developed in Modules 1–5 to discussion of real-world examples. Students also submit Class Participation Journal 1 (400–600 words) to the Journal 1 Dropbox. Both submissions are accessed via the Submit > Dropbox navigation. See the Course Schedule for due dates.

Relationships and Resilience

The centrality of relationships to resilience cannot be overstated. From the attachment bond between infant and caregiver to the friendships and partnerships of adult life, the quality of human connections shapes virtually every dimension of well-being. John Bowlby’s attachment theory proposed that the infant’s primary attachment bond to a caregiver is not merely one feature of early development but its organizing principle — the foundation upon which all subsequent emotional regulation, interpersonal trust, and capacity for intimacy is built. A secure attachment — characterized by the caregiver’s sensitive, responsive attunement to the infant’s signals — predicts competence, curiosity, emotional regulation, and the capacity to use relationships as a base from which to explore and cope with challenge.

Insecure attachment, in its various forms — anxious (preoccupied), avoidant (dismissing), and disorganized — is associated with heightened vulnerability to stress and adversity. However, it is important to note that insecure attachment is not destiny. Earned security describes individuals who had difficult attachment histories but developed security through subsequent relationships — with partners, therapists, mentors, or close friends — that provided corrective emotional experiences. The brain’s capacity for neuroplasticity, discussed in later modules, provides the biological substrate for this kind of change.

Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model, already introduced in Module 1, becomes especially relevant when examining how relationships at different levels of the social ecology support or undermine resilience. The family system is embedded within a community, which is shaped by a culture, which exists within a broader historical and political context. A family with strong internal bonds can still be undermined by a community that is unsafe, underfunded, and stigmatizing. Conversely, a community that provides excellent schools, accessible services, and genuine social inclusion can substantially extend the reach of resilience even into families with significant internal challenges.

Family Resilience

Froma Walsh, in her foundational work on family resilience, proposes that families are not merely the context within which individual children develop; they are themselves systems with their own adaptive capacities. Walsh identifies three domains of family resilience: belief systems (making meaning of adversity, maintaining a positive outlook, spirituality), organizational patterns (flexibility, connectedness, mobilizing social and economic resources), and communication processes (clarity, open emotional expression, collaborative problem-solving). Families that score well across all three domains consistently show better adaptation to adversity and better outcomes for their members.

Crucially, Walsh rejects the deficit model of family functioning. Rather than cataloguing family pathology, her clinical approach identifies and amplifies existing strengths, even in families with serious problems. She argues that adversity can be a crucible for family growth — that families who navigate crises together, when supported appropriately, can emerge with stronger bonds, more authentic communication, and a deepened sense of shared purpose. This does not minimize the genuine suffering that many families endure; it simply insists on recognizing the full picture.

Post-traumatic growth in the context of social support has been examined by Prati and Pietrantoni (2009), whose meta-analysis found that among all predictors of PTG, social support showed the strongest effects. The mechanism appears to involve both the emotional validation that support provides and the opportunity for narrative reconstruction — the process of telling one’s story to others and integrating the experience into a coherent life narrative. This is consistent with psychotherapy research showing that the quality of the therapeutic alliance is among the strongest predictors of treatment outcome, above and beyond the specific techniques employed.

Violence Interruption Programs

The documentary The Interrupters, featured in this module, offers a powerful real-world illustration of community-level resilience work in action. The film follows Violence Interrupters — individuals who grew up in Chicago’s most violent neighbourhoods, many of whom were formerly incarcerated — as they work to prevent retaliatory violence in real time. These individuals possess something no outside professional can easily acquire: credibility in communities that have strong reasons to distrust official institutions. Their life experience becomes a professional asset. The Violence Interrupters program is a practical demonstration of the strengths-based model at the community level — a model that starts not with what a community lacks but with what it already possesses.

Module 8: Family and Community Resilience

Organizational Resilience

Organizations — workplaces, schools, hospitals, nonprofits — can themselves be more or less resilient. Organizational resilience research identifies three interrelated sets of elements. Behavioural elements include the adaptive capacities of individual members: their problem-solving abilities, interpersonal skills, and tolerance for ambiguity. Cognitive elements include the organization’s culture: its capacity for situational awareness (understanding the current state of the system and its environment), shared meaning-making (developing a common interpretation of events), and willingness to update mental models in light of new information. Contextual elements include the structural features of the organization: redundancy (having backup systems and cross-trained personnel so that no single failure causes collapse), flexibility (the ability to reconfigure rapidly in response to changing demands), and systems thinking (understanding how components of the organization interact and feed back on each other).

SWOT analysis — the assessment of an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats — can be adapted as a resilience assessment tool. A resilience-oriented SWOT analysis explicitly focuses on building on existing strengths and opportunities rather than simply cataloguing deficits and risks. The parallel to the individual strengths-based model is direct and intentional.

Community Resilience

Community resilience refers to the capacity of a community as a whole to adapt to, recover from, and grow through adversity. Hall and Zautra (2010) identify key indicators of community resilience: economic capacity (employment, wealth, infrastructure), informational resources (media, communication networks, shared knowledge), social infrastructure (organizations, institutions, trust networks), and community competence (the ability to define problems, identify assets, and take collective action). They note that resilience at the community level is not simply the aggregation of resilient individuals; it involves emergent properties of the social system that cannot be reduced to individual characteristics.

Mykota and Muhajarine (2005) conducted an empirical study of community resilience in the context of disaster preparedness, examining a sample of 13 communities. Their research found significant variance in community resilience across sites, with key differentiators being the presence of strong local leadership, active civic participation, and a history of collective action in response to previous challenges. Communities with this history of collaborative problem-solving were significantly better prepared for new adversities — a finding with direct implications for prevention and community development work.

The Building Resilient Communities initiative from the Waterloo Region illustrates these principles in a local context. This initiative works at the intersection of urban planning, public health, social services, and community engagement to create conditions in which residents are connected to each other, to their neighbourhood assets, and to the broader systems that affect their lives. The COVID-19 Pandemic has severely tested community resilience in the Waterloo Region and globally — providing a natural experiment in how community structures buffer or amplify the effects of population-level adversity.

Module 9: Cultural Dimensions of Resilience

Cultural Factors in Resilience

Culture is not a background variable to be controlled for in resilience research; it is a constitutive dimension of the phenomenon itself. Tweed and Conway (2006) articulate the fundamental challenge: “The very idea of what makes a good outcome (i.e. successful adaptation to adversity) is subject to cultural variability.” Whether a given response to adversity constitutes resilience or pathology depends on the cultural and social context in which that response is evaluated. Practitioners who work with culturally diverse populations must develop the epistemological humility to recognize that their own definitions of healthy adaptation are themselves culturally embedded.

Acculturation, as theorized by John Berry, describes the process by which individuals and groups adapt to contact with a dominant cultural group. Berry identifies four strategies: integration (maintaining one’s heritage culture while engaging fully with the dominant culture), assimilation (abandoning the heritage culture in favour of the dominant culture), separation (maintaining the heritage culture while rejecting the dominant culture), and marginalization (losing connection with both the heritage culture and the dominant culture). Research consistently shows that integration is associated with the best mental health outcomes, while marginalization is associated with the worst. Importantly, acculturation stress — the psychological demands created by the process of cultural transition — is itself a significant risk factor for mental health difficulties, and practitioners serving immigrant and refugee populations must understand and address it.

Phinney’s model of ethnic identity development describes a stage process through which individuals from minority groups develop a coherent and positive sense of their ethnic identity. The stages move from an unexamined acceptance (or avoidance) of ethnic identity, through a period of exploration and questioning, to an achieved ethnic identity characterized by clarity, affirmation, and a sense of belonging. Research indicates that a strong and positive ethnic identity is itself a protective factor for mental health and resilience — a finding that underscores the importance of cultural connection as a resource, not merely a variable to be managed.

Resilience as Socially and Culturally Defined

Michael Ungar argues that the two central processes of resilience — navigation and negotiation — are always culturally mediated. As he states, “Following exposure to adversity, resilience is both the capacity of individuals to navigate their way to the resources that sustain their well-being, and their capacity, individually and collectively, to negotiate for these resources to be provided in culturally-meaningful ways.” This means that practitioners cannot simply identify the generic resources that research shows to be protective and then provide them in standardized ways; they must work with clients and communities to understand what forms of support are culturally meaningful and acceptable.

Ungar provides several examples that challenge conventional Western assumptions. He notes that in some contexts, dropping out of high school may be a resilient response — when schools are substandard, the neighbourhood is marked by racism, and formal education does not offer meaningful outcomes for a marginalized group, dropping out may be a way of preserving dignity, self-confidence, and access to alternative pathways. The concept of healthy paranoia is equally instructive: in inner-city contexts where racism and the threat of violence are genuine and persistent, hypervigilance to potential danger may be adaptive rather than pathological. As Ottawa resident Tyler Boyce told CBC News in May 2020, “I don’t think people understand how tiring it is to be a black man — we’re literally on 24/7.” What an outside observer might pathologize as anxiety or paranoia is, in context, a rational and protective response to a real and recurrent threat.

Ungar also describes how South Asian women may cope with sexual abuse through silence — a strategy that, while incomprehensible from a Western individualist perspective, may preserve the family’s standing and the woman’s own social position within a collectivist culture. Acknowledging that silence can be a form of empowerment does not mean endorsing the conditions of injustice that make such a choice necessary; it means understanding the full meaning of the behaviour before judging it.

Ungar advocates for both emic studies — those that seek an in-depth, context-specific understanding of resilience within a particular culture — and etic studies — those that examine resilience across cultures seeking transcultural patterns. He emphasizes that most existing studies do not clearly specify whether they take an emic or etic approach, which makes their findings difficult to interpret for practitioners working with specific populations. Ideally, a robust science of resilience needs both: emic depth to understand the texture of particular cultural contexts, and etic breadth to identify the universal adaptive systems that Masten calls “ordinary magic.”

Sample Minority Groups and Cultural Resilience

Indigenous communities provide some of the most powerful examples of cultural resilience. Decades of colonial policy — including residential schools, forced relocation, and the systematic suppression of language and culture — have created profound and multigenerational adversity for Indigenous peoples in Canada and globally. Yet Indigenous communities have also demonstrated remarkable collective resilience, and researchers working with Mi’kmaq, Mohawk, Métis, and Inuit communities have identified the protective role of cultural continuity — the degree to which communities have maintained their languages, ceremonial practices, land connections, and governance structures.

Kirmayer and colleagues, through the First Nations Mental Wellness Continuum Framework, have articulated how cultural identity, community belonging, and access to land are not merely cultural preferences but central components of mental health and resilience for Indigenous peoples. The concept of intergenerational trauma — the transmission of the psychological and physiological effects of colonial trauma across generations — is now well-established in the literature, and any resilience framework for Indigenous communities must address this level of analysis.

The Ungar et al. (2010) qualitative study of youth deemed “at-risk” by their communities but “coping well” identified seven tensions that characterized resilient adaptation: access to material resources, relationships, a sense of cohesion with others, personal identity and power, experiences of social justice, cultural traditions, and a sense of belonging. These tensions are not problems to be solved but dynamic balances to be continuously negotiated. The Child and Youth Resilience Measure (CYRM), developed as part of the International Resilience Project (IRP) across 14 sites on 5 continents, operationalizes these tensions across four dimensions: individual strengths, relationships with caregivers, relationships with others, and contextual factors. Its cross-cultural development makes it one of the most internationally validated resilience measures available.

Research on child soldiers in Sierra Leone by Betancourt et al. (2010) demonstrates the power of community acceptance as a resilience factor. Among 260 former child soldiers followed longitudinally from 2002 to 2008, community acceptance — regardless of the severity of violence exposure during the war — was associated with reduced depression and increased prosocial attitudes at follow-up. Increases in aggressive behaviour, by contrast, were predicted by post-conflict stigma and discrimination. This finding is a powerful argument for community-level, anti-stigma interventions as a central component of post-conflict recovery programs.

Module 10: Interventions, Prevention, and Applications

Strengths-Based Interventions

The ROPES model, developed by Graybeal (2001), provides a practical framework for applying the strengths-based approach in clinical and community settings. ROPES stands for Resources (What do you have?), Options (What could you do?), Possibilities (What might you do in the future?), Exceptions (When is the problem not present, or less severe?), and Solutions (What is already working, or has worked in the past?). The ROPES model is specifically designed to counteract the clinician’s natural tendency — trained through a deficit-focused professional education — to gravitate toward problems, symptoms, and diagnostic categories. By structuring the assessment conversation around these five domains, practitioners generate a genuinely different clinical picture and a different therapeutic relationship.

Jones-Smith’s Client Bill of Rights articulates the ethical commitments that should govern all strengths-based practice: clients have the right to be treated with dignity and respect, to have their strengths recognized and built upon, to be empowered rather than managed, and to have their cultural context acknowledged rather than pathologized. This document is not merely an aspirational statement; it is a practical checklist against which practitioners can evaluate their own behaviour and the design of the systems within which they work.

Art-making and recovery represents a growing area of evidence-based practice that draws directly on the strengths-based model. Research on the use of visual art, music, drama, and narrative arts in trauma recovery suggests that creative expression engages meaning-making processes that complement and sometimes exceed what is accessible through verbal psychotherapy alone. The Portraits Redrawn program, featured in the course materials, exemplifies this approach — working with individuals who have experienced significant adversity to use the visual arts as a medium for reconstructing identity and narrative.

Prevention Frameworks

Ann Masten’s Five M’s Framework for prevention and promotion provides a useful organizing structure for intervention design. The five M’s are: Malleability (Can the targeted risk or protective factor actually be changed?), Mediation (Does the targeted factor actually mediate the relationship between adversity and outcome?), Moderation (Does the targeted factor moderate the impact of adversity for specific populations?), Motivation (Are the intended recipients motivated to participate in the intervention?), and Monitoring (Can the effects of the intervention be reliably measured over time?). This framework helps practitioners and program designers avoid the common mistake of designing interventions based on intuition rather than evidence.

Better Beginnings Better Futures (BBBF) is a Canadian longitudinal prevention study initiated in the early 1990s that provides some of the strongest long-term evidence for early childhood resilience promotion in disadvantaged communities. The program provided enriched, community-based supports to families and children from before birth through the school years in eight high-risk communities across Ontario. Long-term follow-up studies conducted 10 and 20 years after program implementation found significant positive effects on academic achievement, mental health, substance use, and family functioning — and, importantly, on the communities themselves, which showed increased social cohesion and civic engagement. BBBF is a model of how sustained, multi-level investment in early childhood can produce lasting change at the individual and community levels.

The Penn Resiliency Program (PRP), developed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania including Jane Gillham and Karen Reivich, is a school-based cognitive-behavioural intervention for adolescents that teaches the core skills of cognitive reappraisal, problem-solving, and assertiveness. PRP has been evaluated in multiple randomized controlled trials and shows significant reductions in depressive symptoms and improvements in explanatory style — the characteristic way in which individuals explain the causes of events, with a resilient explanatory style attributed to internal, stable, and global causes for good events, and external, unstable, and specific causes for bad events.

The ABC Model of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy

The ABC Model, foundational to Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT), provides a simple but powerful framework for understanding the relationship between events, thoughts, and emotions. The model proposes that it is not events themselves (A — Activating events) that cause our emotional reactions (C — Consequences), but rather our beliefs and interpretations about those events (B — Beliefs). This insight has profound implications for resilience: if our emotional responses are mediated by our interpretations, then changing our interpretations is a legitimate route to changing our emotional responses and our behavioural options.

Cognitive reappraisal — the deliberate re-evaluation of the meaning of an event — is among the most robustly supported emotion regulation strategies in the literature. Unlike suppression (which involves inhibiting emotional expression without changing the underlying emotional experience), cognitive reappraisal changes the emotional experience itself and is associated with better long-term mental and physical health outcomes. Teaching clients to generate multiple interpretations of ambiguous events, to identify cognitive distortions (catastrophizing, all-or-nothing thinking, mind-reading, fortune-telling), and to construct more balanced and accurate appraisals are core skills in any evidence-based resilience intervention.

Module 11: Mental Health Models and Capacity-Building Interventions

Two-Factor Model of Mental Health

A recurring and central theme of this course is the Two-Factor Model of Mental Health, advocated strongly by Michael Ungar and aligned with the research of Patricia Deegan and others. This model proposes that psychopathology and subjective well-being are not opposite ends of a single continuum but two independent dimensions that must be assessed separately for each client. A person can have active psychotic symptoms and still experience genuine contentment and meaning in specific domains of life. A person can appear symptom-free and yet be experiencing profound emptiness and disconnection. Understanding this independence is essential for both assessment and intervention.

The clinical implications are substantial. Traditional psychiatric assessment focuses almost exclusively on the psychopathology dimension — measuring the presence, type, severity, and trajectory of symptoms. The Two-Factor Model demands that practitioners also assess subjective well-being: the client’s experience of positive emotion, engagement, meaning, purpose, relationships, and accomplishment. To fail to ask about these dimensions is not merely an incomplete assessment; it is an act of reductionism that can contribute to stigma and to the client’s internalized sense that they are nothing more than their diagnosis.

Patricia Deegan and Personal Medicine

Dr. Patricia Deegan occupies a unique position in the field: she is both a clinical psychologist and a person with lived experience of schizophrenia. Her work challenges the dominant narrative of schizophrenia as a condition of inevitable and progressive decline, beginning with the powerful opening of her 2005 paper: “People with psychiatric disabilities are resilient. Despite the enduring legacy of pessimism regarding outcomes, worldwide longitudinal studies have consistently found that half to two-thirds of people diagnosed with schizophrenia and other major mental health disorders significantly improve or recover.”

Deegan’s concept of personal medicine refers to self-directed, non-pharmaceutical activities that individuals with mental illness use to maintain their well-being and manage their symptoms. Personal medicine includes valued social roles and activities — being a good parent, mentoring, attending university, working — that increase wellness, offer meaning in life, and decrease symptoms. It also includes self-care strategies — exercise, diet, time in nature, calling a friend — that maintain wellness and reduce the risk of hospitalization. In a qualitative study, Deegan found that very few mental health workers actually asked their clients about their personal medicine — a disturbing finding given that failing to integrate personal medicine into treatment planning is associated with non-adherence to psychiatric medications and increased risk of relapse.

Deegan distinguishes between two narratives of recovery. The restitution narrative — favoured by medical professionals — frames recovery as a process of returning to normal through expert treatment: “I was sick, I took medication, I was cured.” The transformation narrative — which Deegan endorses — frames recovery as a self-directed process of healing and reinvention: not a return to a prior self but the forging of a new identity that incorporates the experience of illness as one aspect of a fuller, more complex personhood. Her three diagrams — depicting the self before diagnosis as a richly faceted whole, the self after diagnosis as collapsed into the illness label, and the recovered self as again multi-dimensional but now including vulnerabilities alongside the full range of human experience — are among the most psychologically acute depictions of the subjective experience of mental illness available in the literature.

Three Waves of Capacity-Building Programs

Kent and Davis (2010) organize capacity-building programs for resilience into three historical waves, each building on the one before it while extending the scope and sophistication of the intervention approach.

The first wave, Behavioural Activation, targets the inactivity and avoidance that typically accompany depression and anxiety. The core technique is the activity scheduling log: clients monitor their daily activities and rate each for pleasantness, then deliberately schedule more of the highly-rated activities in the following week. Behavioural Activation is based on the insight that mood and behaviour are bidirectionally related — waiting to feel motivated before taking action is a trap, because action itself generates the positive feedback that produces motivation. Starting small, with incremental and achievable goals, breaks the cycle of inertia and generates momentum.

The second wave, Cognitive-Behaviour Therapy (CBT), extends behavioural interventions by directly targeting the maladaptive cognitions that maintain emotional difficulties. The seminal self-help resource Mind Over Mood by Greenberger and Padesky (2016) makes the core principles of CBT accessible to the general public and to practitioners as a clinical reference. CBT’s goal is to challenge negative thinking and promote positive reappraisals — moving clients from automatic and distorted interpretations of events to more balanced, evidence-based, and flexible ways of understanding their experience.

The third wave incorporates mindfulness into established therapies, most notably in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT). MBCT has strong evidence for reducing the risk of relapse in individuals who have experienced three or more episodes of major depressive disorder. The rationale is that learning to observe one’s negative thoughts without immediately reacting to them — accepting them as mental events rather than facts — breaks the cycle of cognitive reactivity that typically triggers depressive relapse. Marsha Linehan, the developer of DBT, demonstrated extraordinary personal courage in publicly disclosing her own lived experience with Borderline Personality Disorder. She argued that her condition gave her unique insight into the dialectical tension at the heart of DBT: the balance between acceptance (mindfulness-based strategies) and change (CBT-based strategies). DBT teaches clients four core skill sets — mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness — and has strong evidence for reducing suicidal behaviour and self-harm in individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder.

Linehan’s IMPROVE mnemonic offers a practical set of distress tolerance skills: Imagery (visualizing a peaceful memory), Meaning (connecting to values and purpose), Prayer (using reflective practice), Relaxation (progressive muscle relaxation, deep breathing), One thing at a time (present-moment focus), Vacation (brief breaks from routine), and Encouragement (self-compassion and acknowledgment of progress). These tools are accessible to practitioners across disciplines and can be integrated into individual or group therapeutic work.

Strengths-Based CBT, developed by Christine Padesky (2012), extends the traditional CBT framework explicitly in the direction of positive psychology and resilience promotion. Where traditional CBT reduces symptoms, Strengths-Based CBT actively builds happiness and resilience. The four-step model involves: searching for existing strengths, constructing a Personal Model of Resilience (PMR) using the client’s own imagery and metaphors, applying the PMR in the face of ongoing challenges, and practising through deliberate behavioural experiments — including actively seeking out challenges rather than avoiding them.

Two COVID-19-era Canadian programs are worth noting. Bounce Back, funded by the Ontario government and managed by the Canadian Mental Health Association, is a CBT-based skill-building program for individuals with mild-to-moderate depression or anxiety, offered at no cost with telephone coaching and online resources in multiple languages. An evaluation of over 25,000 participants by Lau and Davis (2019) found significant symptom reductions and a recovery rate of 68%. Wellness Together Canada provides 24/7 free mental health and substance use support online and by phone, with a stepped-care model ranging from self-assessment to crisis counselling.

Mindfulness, Technology, and Cancer Care

Research by Grossman et al. (2010) examined Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) with Multiple Sclerosis patients in a randomized controlled trial. The intervention — 8 weeks of group mindfulness training — produced significant improvements in depression, fatigue, and overall quality of life compared to usual care, and these benefits were maintained at six-month follow-up. The effects were not related to gender, level of MS impairment, or medication use, suggesting a genuine and generalizable effect of the mindfulness training itself. The cost-effectiveness of a short-term group intervention with lasting effects across multiple outcome domains makes MBSR an attractive option in systems with limited resources.

Brain mechanisms for mindfulness have been explored using functional MRI by Zeidan et al. (2011), who found that meditation-induced pain relief was associated with activation in regions involved in cognitive regulation of pain processing — including the anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula, and orbitofrontal cortex — and deactivation of the thalamus. These findings provide a neurobiological account of how mindfulness works to reduce pain and suggest that the effects are not simply placebo.

Technology-based resilience interventions represent a growing frontier. eQuoo, a gamified CBT and positive psychology app, showed in a randomized controlled trial by Litvin et al. (2020) that users showed better outcomes on resilience, personal growth, and anxiety compared to a CBT journal app or no intervention. SuperBetter, developed by game designer Jane McGonigal following a debilitating concussion, is a goals-based game structured around positive psychology and CBT principles. Preliminary evidence from Roepke et al. (2015) found fewer depressive symptoms in users compared to controls after one month of daily engagement.

Coyne and Tennen (2010) sound an important cautionary note regarding positive psychology and cancer care. While group and individual therapy clearly support cancer patients by providing emotional support, promoting coping, and reducing distress, claims that psychological interventions can slow cancer progression or improve mortality are not supported by rigorous evidence and may cause harm by generating unrealistic expectations. Publication bias (only positive studies reach print) and confirmatory bias (researchers and clinicians selectively attend to evidence that confirms their beliefs) contribute to a public perception that is more optimistic than the actual evidence warrants. Practitioners must balance offering genuine hope with providing accurate information — a skill that requires both clinical wisdom and ongoing engagement with the empirical literature.

The final module of SDS 355R returns to the foundational principle with which the course began: resilience is a social-ecological construct. Ungar’s five-level model — individual, relationship, community, cultural, and physical ecology — provides the integrating framework for everything that has been covered across twelve modules. No intervention at any single level is sufficient on its own. The individual’s positive emotions and self-efficacy are powerful resources, but they are substantially shaped by and dependent upon the quality of the relationships, institutions, cultural contexts, and physical environments within which people live their lives.

John Kretzmann’s (2010) asset-based approach to community development provides the practical complement to this theoretical framework. Kretzmann argues forcefully that conventional approaches to community development — which begin by cataloguing community needs (unemployment, poverty, crime, poor health) — are not only insufficient but actively counterproductive, because they define communities by their deficits and establish a dependency relationship with outside experts and funders. The Neighbourhood Assets Map instead begins with what communities already possess: individual residents with experiences, gifts, and passions (including ex-offenders, older adults, people with disabilities, and others typically seen as burdens); voluntary associations and local networks (block watches, faith communities, reading groups); local public, private, and nonprofit institutions (schools, libraries, hospitals); physical resources (parks, transit, historic buildings); local economic life; and local culture, history, values, and stories. Building from these assets, rather than on the back of deficits, produces more sustainable development and more empowered communities.

Tapping into Community Assets: Older Adults and Volunteerism

Generativity, a concept developed by Erik Erikson to describe the concern for establishing and guiding the next generation, is a powerful motivator for older adults in community service. As Canada experiences the demographic transition associated with the aging of the Baby Boom generation, the potential of older adults as an underutilized community asset is enormous. Research consistently finds that older adults who volunteer, particularly in roles that involve meaningful intergenerational contact, show improvements in cognitive function, physical activity, social engagement, and overall well-being.

The Experience Corps Program exemplifies this potential. In this program, older adults (typically African-American) volunteer approximately 16 hours per week for one academic year as reading coaches, tutors, and classroom helpers in inner-city elementary schools. The effects on older adult volunteers are striking: less time spent watching television, improved social engagement, increased physical activity, improved strength, and improved performance on cognitive assessments. Carlson et al. (2009) documented neuroimaging evidence of neuroplasticity in Experience Corps volunteers, with intervention-specific gains in executive function and prefrontal cortical activity. The effects on students were equally impressive: better reading test scores, fewer disciplinary referrals, and high satisfaction among teachers and principals. Ninety-eight percent of volunteers reported satisfaction with the program, and 80 percent returned for a second year.

Community Gardening: Individual, Community, and Environmental Well-Being

Okvat and Zautra (2011) make a compelling case for community gardening as a multilevel resilience intervention — one that simultaneously addresses individual well-being, community cohesion, and environmental sustainability. At the individual level, living in greener surroundings is associated with improved attentional performance and a reduced risk of dementia; gardening is associated with relaxation, a sense of accomplishment, reduced stress, and hope. At the community level, community gardens promote social contact and inclusivity, serve as cross-cultural unifiers by bringing people of different backgrounds into shared activity, stimulate community organizing and self-reliance, and are associated with lower rates of property crime, violent crime, and domestic abuse. At the environmental level, community gardens promote a “reverse greenhouse effect” (plants absorbing CO₂ and releasing O₂), reduce food transportation emissions, enhance biodiversity, and educate children and families about environmental stewardship.

Okvat and Zautra encourage a paradigm shift in how we define community — one that extends the definition to include other species and the Earth itself. This is not mere metaphor; it reflects a growing convergence between resilience science, environmental psychology, and ecological social work. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto has incorporated this insight directly into its clinical programming: the 2012 redevelopment of the Queen Street site transformed what had historically been a walled and segregated institution into an urban facility with terrace gardens, green roofs, and community access, using gardening as part of the formal treatment and recovery program.

The province of Ontario’s designation of community gardens as an essential service during the COVID-19 Pandemic on April 25, 2020, reflects an official acknowledgment of what resilience researchers have long known: access to green space and community-based food growing is not a luxury but a health necessity.

Robert Case (2017), a social work professor at Renison University College (affiliated with the University of Waterloo), argues that social work as a profession has only recently begun to grapple seriously with environmental issues. His qualitative study of water activism in Guelph, Ontario illuminates how local environmental issues become sites of community resilience-building. When Nestlé Canada applied for a license to extract 3.6 million litres of groundwater per day from the Guelph region, and when municipal planning proposed a pipeline from Lake Erie to meet projected population growth, local activists mobilized around three interconnected values: self-reliance and sustainability (managing local resources locally), localization and direct citizen participation (shared governance of community assets), and community (the recognition that environmental issues are fundamentally community issues, with water as a “portal for community development”).

Case’s study illustrates how environmental activism can be a vehicle for building exactly the kind of collective efficacy, social capital, and civic engagement that resilience research identifies as protective at the community level. The parallels to the COVID-19 response are instructive: communities that had already developed these capacities — for collective action, distributed leadership, and care for shared resources — were better positioned to respond effectively to the pandemic’s demands.

Prime Minister Trudeau’s 2021 pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40–45% below 2005 levels by 2030, accompanied by investments in public transit, clean energy, the banning of single-use plastics, and the planting of two billion trees, represents the national-level expression of the same impulse toward proactive, collaborative, and ecologically grounded community resilience.

Regional Community Resilience Initiatives

At the local level, several initiatives in the Waterloo Region exemplify the asset-based, community resilience model discussed throughout this course.

The Waterloo Region Community Gardening Network brings together the Region of Waterloo Public Health, the Food Bank of Waterloo Region, local gardeners, and community members to support community food-growing across the region. The University of Waterloo Food Sustainability initiative includes efforts to source food locally, maintain Fair Trade Campus designation, operate farm markets, and support community gardens at WPIRG and St. Paul’s University College. The Wellington Water Watchers organization works on water conservation and protection in the Guelph and Wellington area — directly connected to the eco-social work themes in Case’s research.

These local examples are not merely nice illustrations of abstract principles; they are the operational ground-level reality of resilience science translated into community practice. They demonstrate that the social-ecological model of resilience is not only theoretically coherent but practically actionable — in classrooms, in community centres, in gardens, and in local political life.

Conclusion: There’s Always Something You Can Do

This course has moved from the foundations of positive psychology and individual resilience, through the relational and social dimensions of support, across the cultural complexity of resilience as a socially defined phenomenon, into the practical domains of intervention, prevention, and community development. It has done so in the shadow of a global pandemic that has tested every one of these concepts in real time, and that has, in the process, illuminated both the fragility and the extraordinary durability of human and community resilience.

Dr. Perretta concludes the course with a poem, inspired by a client with severe Parkinson’s disease who told a group therapy program, “There’s always something you can do.” Despite being barely able to walk or move, her social and inner life proved the truth of those words. The poem is offered here in full as the final word of the course — not as a platitude, but as hard-won knowledge about the irreducible human capacity to respond, to connect, and to find meaning:

There’s Always Something You Can Do By Jim Perretta

When you feel all alone And your world seems sad & blue Just remember, my friend There’s always something you can do

When you can’t see ahead And you can’t hear what’s around you Just remember, my friend There’s always something you can do

When your loved ones turn away And they say things that are untrue Just remember, my friend There’s always something you can do

When your health takes a turn And you struggle to walk or move Just remember, my friend There’s always something you can do

When you take your last breath And you worry what’s ahead for you Just remember, my friend There’s nothing more you have to do