The ITRC will launch a "Community of Practice" (CoP) this October to educate, connect, and empower people throughout industrialized nations to organize and operate community-based culturally accountable initiatives that use a public health approach to enhance the entire population's capacity for mental wellness and transformational resilience for the climate crisis. You can learn about the CoP by attending a free webinar on July 28.
Why Prioritize Forming Community-Based Population-Level Mental Wellness and Resilience Initiatives?
Few people fully grasp this yet, but humanity is in the midst of a civilization-altering event. Accelerating global temperatures are creating a mix of cascading disruptions to the ecological, economic, and social systems people rely on for basic needs, and more frequent, extreme, and prolonged disasters. We are unprepared for the suffering speeding our way. If we remain so the result will be individual, community, and societal traumas far beyond anything modern society has ever experienced. The traumas will threaten everyone's mental and physical health, safety, and security. They will also make it even more difficult to reduce the climate crisis to manageable levels.
New thinking and approaches are needed to address the scale and scope of the traumas speeding our way. This requires a public health approach to enhancing and sustaining mental health and psychosocial wellbeing, not clinical treatment.
A public health approach focuses first and foremost on preventing problems through changes in norms, habits, practices, and policies, not treating symptoms of pathology after they appear. It focuses on the entire population, not just those deemed at-risk or vulnerable--although they must be given special attention. And it emphasizes identifying and strengthening existing and forming new protective factors that help people push back against and remain healthy and resilient during adversities.
Accordingly, a wide and diverse coalition of local residents, groups, and organizations must come together to plan, implement, and continually improve age and culturally accountable, strategies that help all adults and youth enhance their capacity for mental wellness and resilience during adversities. Actions to slash greenhouse gas emissions, regenerate local ecological systems, and adapt to climate impacts should be integrated into the initiatives.
If whole-community initiatives are launched, the indomitable human capacity for wellness and resilience can be activated, the climate climate crisis can, over time, be reduced to manageable levels, and people will regain healthy hope in the future.
The July 28 Free Webinar Will Describe These Issues In Depth as Well as The Goals and Methods Involved with the Community Of Practice (CoP).
To register for the July 28b webinar go to the ITRC website: http://www.theresourceinnovationgroup.org/
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