Dates for the new keynote sessions will be announced soon. We aim to pair up speakers in order to provide a thought provoking dialogue and discussion from different perspectives. The following line-up was put together for the postponed 2020 conference and may be subject to change.
Keynote / plenary session summaries
Wellness, Fairness, and Worthiness: Psychosocial Foundations for Personal and Collective Resilience – Prof Isaac Prilleltensky
Whereas psychology has been mainly concerned with the private good, there is an urgent need to understand and foster the collective good to foster resilience in our communities. In the absence of a coherent framework for the common good, it will be extremely difficult to control pandemics, address climate change, promote peace, reduce poverty, tackle discrimination, eliminate injustice, achieve equality, and become resilient communities. While frameworks for personal well-being and resilience abound in psychology, conceptualizations of collective well-being and resilience are scarce. Our search for psychosocial foundations of the common good resulted in the identification of three pillars: wellness, fairness, and worthiness. There are several reasons for choosing them, including the fact that they represent fundamental human needs, have exceptional explanatory power, exist at multiple ecological levels, have great transformative potential, and are catalyst for resilience. The complementary nature of the three pillars is illustrated in an interactional model. Applications of the model at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, occupational, communal, national, and global levels are presented. The proposed pillars are used to formulate a culture for the common good in which we balance the right with the responsibility to feel valued and add value, to self and others, in order to promote not just wellness but also fairness.
The value of social learning: youth resilience in Blackpool – Sam Richardson and Prof Etienne Wenger-Trayner
This double-act keynote brings together international social learning theorist Etienne Wenger-Trayner with Blackpool youth worker Sam Richardson for a conversation about learning to be resilient. They come to the topic from two very different, but complementary perspectives. By weaving these two perspectives, their conversation will shine a light on two dimensions of the resilience work at HeadStart Blackpool. They will explore the adoption of social learning as an approach to developing resilience among youths. They will also discuss the use of the Wenger-Trayner value-creation framework to make the value of this approach visible to participants and stakeholders. In this dance of theory and practice, the rigor underlying the work of HeadStart Blackpool will become apparent and the formal framework they used will come to life.
Anti-racism and the Resilience Revolution – Ngozi Lyn Cole
Ngozi Lyn Cole was there when the Resilience Revolution was born. As England Director at the National Lottery Community fund, she led the development of the HeadStart programme, a six-year, £67.4 million programme set up in 2016 to explore and test new ways to improve the mental health and wellbeing of young people and prevent serious mental health issues from developing. Since then she has followed our work with great interest and was really exciting to visit Blackpool in 2018 to see the revolution in progress.
Now a self-employed coach and leadership catalyst, Ngozi will join us to talk about how we can truly move from ‘non-racism‘ to ‘anti-racism’ and by doing so truly beat the odds while changing the odds’ for EVERYONE. We will discuss what feels uncomfortable when we talk about race; how people from minority ethnic groups experience our society; why language is so important and the roles that we can all play as allies to improve racial equity. Finally we will spend some time reflecting on the personal commitment we can make to help leave the world a better place than the one we arrived in. As Barack Obama said, ‘Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek’.
