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3rd Right every Wrong Conclave
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Brisbane Institute Strengths Strategies Strengths Approach, Human Resource Development, Social change, Transition societies, Role of youth, Entrepreneurship development, Governance and people strengthening practices, Volunteers development Asset Based Community Development Micro credits and finance
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This
visual presentation explores the
relationship between creative arts practice
and trauma, loss and grief, including the
shadowy world of sexual abuse. It is an
examination of what art and the artist,
through collaborative creative processes,
contributes to wellbeing in the aftermath of
such experiences. I will speak of my
recently completed PhD and the creative
research projects I conducted with
communities of women who had experienced
trauma and loss and who carried the pain of
these experiences for years afterwards. My
presentation will consider how artmaking and
working with an artist contributed to their
capacity to live well, better communicate
and function within the world reducing
isolation and debilitating feelings of
loneliness and depression. In discussing the
processes of creativity, I will demonstrate
how this empowered participants to think,
behave and relate in ways that until their
participation had been elusive to them,
including offering hope, belief and skills
for a happier future:A remarkable shift for
those who constantly lived on the brink of
suicide. The presentation considers how
artists delve into the shadows of what
hurts, disturbs and stultifies, in order to
offer something back that reveals,
transforms and restores. 
Traumatic
experiences such as domestic violence, grief
and loss or parental mental illness can
negatively impact on children's cognitive,
physical, social, emotional and academic
functioning (Paolucci, Genuis, & Violato,
2001). Research recommends that
professionals build resiliency skills in
children to help them develop protective
thinking and behaviours to manage stress and
trauma (Berson & Baggerley 2009). This paper
overviews best practice in helping children
living in adverse circumstances and presents
examples of two strengths based
interventions that foster resiliency in
young children, engaged in a regional early
intervention program. Experiences in this
practice setting indicate that the interplay
of children's strengths and resilience
enhancing intervention strategies can
empower young children experiencing stress.
The
scope and speed of the internal migration of
over 200 million people as a result of
China's rapid urbanization is unprecedented
in human history. Since the late 1990s,
family migrations have become more common
than individual migrations, and migrants are
more likely to settle permanently rather
than temporarily relocate in cities. This
research focuses on the challenges
confronting rural migrant families residing
in urban China and the strategies they adopt
to meet them. From July 2008 to December
2009, our research team followed 12 migrant
families who lived on the outskirts of
Beijing. This paper describes their
migration paths, family arrangements, and
the methods they employ to confront
challenges. Adopting the family strengths
perspective, the study identifies the
strategies employed by the migrant
population to manage family life, the
reliance on family networks for support, and
the lack of equal access to state-provided
benefits and services. The author maintains
that, in addition to providing necessary
family services to the migrant population
and developing strength-based interventions,
fundamental reforms must be enacted to
abolish the urban-rural hukou and ensure
equal distribution of benefits and access to
social services.
This
paper explores coping and resilience and the
intersection of climate, disability and
rurality. The social impact of Australia's
drought is vast. In 2009 Raphael et al.
found that 86.3% of people in rural and
remote NSW had made profound and long term
changes to their lives due to the ongoing
drought. Many factors impact on people's
resilience to natural disasters such as
drought including gender. Unfortunately,
disability is believed to have a negative
impact on resilience to natural disasters
such as drought (Fjord and Manderson, 2009;
Harley et al., 2008). Eley et al. (2009)
found that in all regions of Australia,
women are the most likely people to care for
people with intellectual and developmental
disability (also those who reported a belief
that they must be prepared for long term
drought Raphael et al., 2009), but in rural
and remote Australia men are most likely to
experience disability (Eley et al., 2009).
This paper will explore the coping and
resilience strategies of people who have an
intellectual disability and their families
who live in rural and remote areas of
Australia affected by drought. 
Family
support has an important role in the
survival rate of children who suffer from
paediatric Thalassemic. As part of the
treatment regime, the patient needs to
receive blood transfusions regularly,
usually once every three months. As the
child needs to undergo pathology tests prior
to each blood transfusion, each treatment
usually requires two working days to
complete. In Indonesia, the Thalassemic
treatment is only available in certain
cities, e.g. Surabaya. Families from the
rural areas have to travel to the big cities
and stay overnight there. They stay either
with their relatives or in the hospital
waiting room. In this research, the medical
team investigate the role of faith in the
patient's recovery and survival. The results
indicate that patient's faith and recovery
are correlated. The patient's mother has an
important role in the recovery. The patient'
mother usually is the person who manages
their daily needs, and follows up the
therapy procedures. The patients learn to
cope with the pain caused by the disease and
the treatment procedures. As the patients
grow up, they also learn to support
themselves.
Adolescents
experience tremendous life stresses and are
vulnerable to depressive mood. A resilience
perspective stresses the importance of
identifying protective factors that could
mitigate the impact of risk. Spirituality is
increasingly studied in the western
countries has been shown to reduce the
effect of risk on individual's mental
health. Related research was limited in
Taiwan, where this study was conducted. This
study intends to examine the contribution of
parent-adolescence conflict, family economic
stress, peer relationship stress, academic
expectation stress to depressive mood among
adolescents in Taiwan. Data was collected
from self-report questionnaires administered
to 1,306 Taiwanese students from grades 10
to 12. 1,207 questionnaires with complete
information were included in multiple
regression analyses. Result indicates that
after controlling for gender, age, and
self-esteem, life stresses and spirituality
were significantly associated with
adolescent depressive mood. Spirituality
moderated the effect of peer relationship
stress on adolescent depressive mood.
Findings suggest that spirituality is an
important concept to help adolescents from
being affected by life stressors. Helping
professionals should incorporate this
concept into their work with depressive
adolescents. 
The
explosive outpouring of knowledge about the
brain and how mindset directly affects how
the brain and body function leads us to ask
not only how to make things better, but also
what are we making ourselves better from?
Why is our resilience so sorely tested and
our hope so diminished? What led us to focus
on failures rather than strengths? The
Winner/Loser World Theory draws from the
knowledge base of Interpersonal
Neurobiology, Positive Psychology,
Complexity Theory and the new field of
Psychosocial Genomics to describe the
damaging effects of a world where personal
worth and value is often based on whether
arbitrary external social measures are
achieved. This mindset creates a fearful
cascade of activity in the brain and body
that has an underlying and chronic impact on
resilience, hope and confidence in personal
strengths. The natural, healthy and strength
based processes are readily enabled when in
the positively engaged mindset of personal
challenge and endeavour. A simple set of
self-organising fundamentals will be shown
that can shift our mindset rapidly and
readily into a space where resilience, hope
and personal strengths become the
foundations of daily life rather than an
aching need. 
Children's
resilience in facing adversities is perhaps
one of the vital strengths that need to be
fostered before they enter the stage of
adolescence, a period with increasing
exposure to the outside world. We have
developed a four-session Hope Oriented
Parents Education (H.O.P.E.) program for
families in Hong Kong. 94 parents and one of
their children aged between 8 to10 years old
were randomly assigned to either an
intervention or waitlist control group.
Parents in the intervention group received
the H.O.P.E. training program for four
weeks. They were then asked to do hope story
telling intervention with their children for
another four weeks. Both parents and their
children received pre- and post-training
assessments on hope, happiness, and harmony.
Our results showed that parents had an
increase in hope level before and after the
H.O.P.E. program and this increase in hope
level was maintained after 4 weeks. Children
in the intervention group, but not children
in the waitlist control group, tended to
show an increase in both happiness and
harmony levels after hope story telling by
their parents. In the presentation, we shall
describe our training program. This project
is funded by the Hong Kong Jockey Club
Charities Trust. 
Receiving
a diagnosis of schizophrenia can be regarded
as a significantly adverse life event and is
an indication that the person is regarded to
be vulnerable, rather than resilient, if
viewed using the stress-diathesis model,
because they have responded to stress by
becoming unwell rather than thriving. Is it
possible then, for a person who has been
diagnosed with schizophrenia to respond
resiliently or to develop resilience in the
journey with schizophrenia? 
According
to research, hope is one of the most
important character strengths in predicting
happiness and depression. Moreover,
accumulating evidence showed that
individuals with high levels of hope tend to
remain energetic and resilient even in the
midst of adversity and crisis. When facing
difficulties, these individuals are more
capable to stay persistent in pursuing their
goals, which is exactly a trait that is most
desirable to our times.