If you are like me, you have a love-hate relationship with the word ‘resilience’. Resilience is often referred to as an important skill and when the term is referenced, people often admire the outcome that resilience produces and forget the human journey required to become resilient. This journey can often involve anxiety, anger, frustration, truth-telling, confusion, subsequent acceptance of an imperfect situation or system, and hope – the tough stuff. In a world that is constantly changing, the word ‘resilience’ has become common vernacular to describe outcomes around health and wellbeing, natural disaster recovery, children and families and so much more. But what do we mean by resilience and how do we measure it?

The SIMNA Sydney Chapter in association with the Australian Evaluation Society hosted a remarkable panel discussion that delved into the world of resilience with the following speakers:

• Skye Trudgett, CEO of Kowa Collaboration, who specialise in First Nations evaluation, including the design and implementation of First Nations Data sovereignty within practice
• Associate Professor Ann Dadich who specialises in Human Resources and Management with Western Sydney University, School of Business
• Dr. Catherine Kaplun who specialises in health and education with families and children Western Sydney University
• Molly Tregoning, Director of Program Design and Coordination from Resilience NSW

The word, resilience, came from the Latin verb “resilire” and this means “rebounding or jumping back”. The Oxford dictionary defines it as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties”. In my interactions with the word, it’s often been used to describe someone’s personality or character, but in fact, it goes beyond this. Our speakers highlight that resilience is more than a skill, but rather a process, context and outcome. It’s something that can be built over time, with the right tools, methods, support, and facilitators. Our panelists spoke about resilience in 3 key areas – children and families, natural disasters, and First Nations Peoples and Communities.

Children and Families

The first 2,000 days of a child’s life are vital in ensuring they are given the best possible start to life so they can develop healthy physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development later in life. The TEEACH Research Centre at Western Sydney University studies 0 to 8-year-olds focusing on the immediate influence of certain factors in early childhood and how they impact on adolescents and adults later in life. The Centre uses an established HOPE framework which allows researchers to understand positive and negative child and family indicators. These are used to inform when and how healthcare and education practitioners should intervene and provide support. This helps to identify appropriate supports and interventions that can be used with children, families and within communities to make them stronger and supported.

When it comes to families and support systems, it’s often common practice to think of what went wrong or what’s missing in a particular intervention. I liked when Ann shared some of the questions she uses at the beginning of her research to understand what’s working well, these included “what are you proud of and what makes your heart sing?”. Dr. Catherine highlighted the importance of co-designing interventions with individuals and communities, along with understanding what communities already have, and then conducting a needs assessment to identify specific needs of communities to drive positive outcomes.

Natural disasters

With the climate crisis in full swing, the need for recovery has never been more consequential. Resilience NSW is in the business of supporting communities at the recovery stage, playing a connector and convener role to serve communities during a natural disaster. Through the recovery process, the Resilience NSW team looks at how they can work with people from the impacted community to understand their needs, priorities, and tools they need to bounce back (e.g., providing grants to community-based organisations to deliver specific services). Through this process, Resilience NSW hopes it is also preparing the community to be more ready and understanding of the risks, should another natural disaster occur.

Ultimately, Resilience NSW wants to create a NSW where communities have the support, information, funding, and programs to take the lead themselves when a natural disaster hits. Molly mentioned that sometimes ‘communities don’t need support and this is when Resilience NSW needs to get out of the way’. In other cases, Molly and the team are helping communities navigate financing, and bureaucracy, and pulling together offerings from different agencies for a particular community, that a community would not have had access to, without Resilience NSW playing a facilitator role.

However, there are also some barriers and considerations Molly highlighted, including short-term funding cycles, not having a consistent natural disaster approach across the state, and ensuring there is equity in opportunities whilst balancing specific community needs regardless of location.

First Nations Peoples and Communities

We heard that for First Nations peoples and communities, resilience moves beyond the experience of the individual, and is inclusive of collective strength and connections. Skye Trudgett reflected on the many ways in which resilience has been shared and contextualised (within evaluation projects conducted by Kowa); truth telling, collective knowing and being or connecting with people and Country. Skye noted that many First Nations Peoples, organisations and Communities have been able to strengthen resilience through connecting with Culture, Country, place and Community. Some organisations, including Kowa, have been taking steps toward building resilience of cross-cultural Communities through First Nations place-making efforts.

In First Nations communities, it’s important to start the conversation around resilience by understanding the strengths of Community, and what is already strong in terms of Culture, family, and connection to Country. An approach that Kowa uses to start conversations is “Impact Yarns”, where “people are asked to express what has been impactful to them. Impact Yarns allows individuals and Communities to use collective knowledge, Cultural knowledge and artefacts such as photos, video, art, song, dance and meals to share their experience of impact”. This creates a safe space, but also a reference point to discuss resilience in terms that are relevant to Community. This approach is significant because without this, the default is to use existing datasets that are easily accessible (publicly available) or tell a story of First Nations communities that is not defined by Communities themselves; many of these datasets are Government datasets that are inherently biased. Skye highlights that such data “doesn’t tell us the true picture, the picture that Community know is true. Often, the data we have access to today, paints a deficit discourse and fails to share the strengths of First Nations peoples and Communities”. Instead of relying on easily accessible or Government data to do a needs assessment of a certain communities, practitioners can ask the community questions, such as “what are the things that you can (or might) see, hear or know if X outcome was achieved? E.g. more families having picnics in the park or more children playing”. This type of data gathering requires deep listening, understanding, premising Cultural knowledges, and pushing through the surface, especially at times when crises are being faced by Community. For some people, progress means moving forward past the struggle – pushing through. However, in deeply traumatic situations, to be resilient, there needs to be truth-telling and reparative humanism.

Truth-telling is about working together to repair, visit, and heal the past and then moving forward. Many communities are doing this already and demonstrating resilience by connecting back to Country, rejuvenating Country and revitalising languages, learning about Culture and history, and taking leadership roles in communities. A good example of this is Healthy Communities delivered by the Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (VACCHO), which is the peak representative for the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Victoria. In this example, the outcome VACCHO supported was innovative funding and program design that sought to build foundations for healthy and thriving Communities, determined and implemented by Community. VACCHO worked together with a number of Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations (ACCHOs) who designed and implemented programs based on community- specific needs. They started using Impact Yarns and developed a social return on investment; however, the indicators, ratios, financial proxies and place-based theories of change, were created by listening to Community, who were already embedding evaluation within their resilience strengthening initiatives.

This panel discussion highlighted that the journey to resilience means different things to different people and communities, and that’s a good thing. Understanding the nuances of your community, building trust, and finding ways to measure resilience specific to the community you are working with, means that you are building indicators, practices, and data that are unique, meaningful, and lead to positive collective outcomes.

Written by: Kuppal Palaniappan (SIMNA Sydney Organising Committee)