October is resilience month, so it’s a good time to reflect on what resilience is. Resilience is the ability to withstand a shock or recover from it quickly. Resilience is the process and the outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially those requiring mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility, and adjustment to external and internal demands. Resilience is often looked at on the individual level, does that one person have the skills to overcome adversity on their own? Yet resilience more often comes from community connections and infrastructure helping us overcome hardship in a network of support.
Community Resiliency surrounds us all. For the most part, we have friends and family we can turn to for help. We also have organizations that help us when the chips are down, whether it’s non-profits, religious affiliations, insurance plans, or financial resources. This community level resilience is an active recognition that we need help outside of ourselves and the infrastructure is there to meet us when needed. Resilient communities have relationships with external resources that provide a wider supportive environment and supply the actual goods and services when a situation arises. This community resiliency framework underscores personal resilience.
In 4-H we often talk about teaching life skills and we use the wheel in the picture below to show how the life skills learned in 4-H relate to each of the 4 ‘H’’s. Resiliency is one of the skills listed, but it doesn’t mean much if you don’t think about what it takes to be able to bounce back from a shock. Each life skill that 4-H imparts are resiliency tools, they are skills that help a person become more personally resilient and they also demonstrate how a person can contribute to and be integral in a more resilient community.
Being a resilient person means you are able to withstand adversity and bounce back and grow despite life’s downturns and that is a skill to grow and develop over your lifetime. Being resilient doesn’t mean you don’t get stressed, emotionally down, or live free from suffering, it does mean you are able to work through it, you can recover, cope, learn and stay positive. Building resiliency includes these five elements: community, compassion, confidence, commitment, and centering. How could you increase your resilience? Set yourself a goal to grow your resilience.
At 4-H, we leaned into our resilience in August when just three weeks before the Clallam County Fair we heard of an avian flu outbreak and thought we wouldn’t be able to have birds again. Then found out we could but needed to start keeping the turkeys inside a barn for protection from wild geese. We had always kept them outside and the chickens shared the barn with rabbits and cavies. Several of us had to come together and think about what to do, manage our feelings (we had some feelings), use critical and creative thinking, communicate, work together on a plan, so we could prioritize disease prevention for the birds. We were all over that life skills wheel but our dedication to community resilience in the form of making sure kids could bring their birds to fair is why we were able to have birds there. This is how the poultry ended up in a different barn than the rabbits and cavies.
As the 4-H pledge says:
I pledge my head to clearer thinking,
My heart to greater loyalty,
My hands to larger service,
And my health to better living,
For my club, my community, my country, and my world.
Being resilient means bouncing back when you think you may not be able to have poultry in the fair and you work to figure out how to make it happen. You see last year they didn’t have poultry due to the avian flu; kids had been raising poultry for the past three years and had not been able to show them between the pandemic and the avian flu. They had been waiting for this opportunity for years. There was some leeway, so the 4-H leaders worked with the fair and the WSDA state veterinarian’s office around what the safety needs were, what needed to be taken into account, worked with the fairgrounds and superintendents. In the end they changed what animals were in what barns, each bird was on its own surface during judging, the layout of the barn was changed, and the public could not touch the animals this year. The animals had to be spaced out, there was more sanitizer, it was a total rearrangement and review of all the ways things were done for the poultry. Being resilient, staying positive and keeping heads together, moving through the feelings, and keeping the goal in sight pulled it through successfully. So, while it was two weeks before the fair and suddenly a million obstacles showed up, community resilience saw it through. It took a resilient community to see this gigantic task through, and that resilience shone through everyone involved.
Your personal resilience and the resilience of our community are all intertwined. Thank you for all that you contribute!