RESILIENT ROTHERHAM?

The notion of community resilience is complicated in part because both terms have many aspects. We have distinguished three types of community: of purpose, such as a political association, of culture, such as religion and of locality, such as a neighbourhood. Our primary interest in this report is with communities of locality. We have suggested a three-faceted model of resilience in which it is described as: of something, to something (a stressor), to an endpoint. Thus (local) community resilience is: of a neighbourhood or locality, to a stressor, such as an earthquake, to an endpoint, such as back-to-normal. The stressors faced by a community can be acute, such as an earthquake or the shutdown of a local employer, or chronic, such as long-term poverty and unemployment. Community resilience is most easily seen in relation to acute stressors in part because both the stressor and endpoint are fairly clear. It is less clear with chronic stressors mainly because the endpoint cannot be back-to-normal. We therefore suggested a distinction between as-you-were and as-you-should-be endpoints. An example of as-you-should-be resilience is where someone becomes a well-functioning adult despite abuse as a child. In relation to communities of locality, the as-you-should-be endpoint is roughly that they will provide places which enable rather than impede their members to live well, to flourish and to be happy. A local community is resilient to the extent that it does this in the face of stressors, such as poverty. Resilient communities can be identified by combining measures of individual wellbeing, such as quality of life and health, with indicators of stressors, such as deprivation. A resilient community is one that is deprived but in which people do better than average in regard to these measures. This method of identifying resilient communities is an outlier method; it depends on finding those better than average. One problem with this is that it does not give an objective measure of resilience; we could use it only to show that one community has become more resilient in relation to another, not that it has become more resilient per se. Final v7 23 This problem links to a more general problem with the literature on measuring, characterising and enhancing community resilience. This is that insufficient distinction is made between measures of how well people within a community are doing, i.e. their wellbeing, and of how resilient they are, i.e. their wellbeing given particular stressors. Thus most of the measures we identified in the literature as possible contributors to resilience were more like contributors to wellbeing. For example, measures to improve the built environment or social networks are better characterised as enhancing social capital and wellbeing rather than resilience. In practice, there seems likely to be a link between resilience and wellbeing. An individual or community without resilience to likely challenges would have precarious wellbeing

An argument against the focus on community resilience in public health

Background - It has been suggested that Public Health professionals focus on community resilience in tackling chronic problems, such as poverty and deprivation; is this approach useful? Discussion - Resilience is always i) of something ii) to something iii) to an endpoint, as in i) a rubber ball, ii) to a blunt force, iii) to its original shape. “Community resilience” might be: of a neighbourhood, to a flu pandemic, with the endpoint, to return to normality. In these two examples, the endpoint is as-you-were. This is unsuitable for some examples of resilience. A child that is resilient to an abusive upbringing has an endpoint of living a happy life despite that upbringing: this is an as-you-should-be endpoint. Similarly, a chronically deprived community cannot have the endpoint of returning to chronic deprivation: so what is its endpoint? Roughly, it is an as-you-should-be endpoint: to provide an environment for inhabitants to live well. Thus resilient communities will be those that do this in the face of challenges. How can they be identified? One method uses statistical outliers, neighbourhoods that do better than would be expected on a range of outcomes given a range of stressors. This method tells us that a neighbourhood is resilient but not why it is. In response, a number of researchers have attributed characteristics to resilient communities; however, these generally fail to distinguish characteristics of a good community from those of a resilient one. Making this distinction is difficult and we have not seen it successfully done; more importantly, it is arguably unnecessary. There already exist approaches in Public Health to assessing and developing communities faced with chronic problems, typically tied to notions such as Social Capital. Communityresilience to chronic problems, if it makes sense at all, is likely to be a property that emerges from the various assets in a community such as human capital, built capital and natural capital. Summary - Public Health professionals working with deprived neighbourhoods would be better to focus on what neighbourhoods have or could develop as social capital for living well, rather than on the vague and tangential notion of community resilience.</p

An argument against the focus on Community Resilience in Public Health

Background - It has been suggested that Public Health professionals focus on community resilience in tackling chronic problems, such as poverty and deprivation; is this approach useful? Discussion - Resilience is always i) of something ii) to something iii) to an endpoint, as in i) a rubber ball, ii) to a blunt force, iii) to its original shape. “Community resilience” might be: of a neighbourhood, to a flu pandemic, with the endpoint, to return to normality. In these two examples, the endpoint is as-you-were. This is unsuitable for some examples of resilience. A child that is resilient to an abusive upbringing has an endpoint of living a happy life despite that upbringing: this is an as-you-should-be endpoint. Similarly, a chronically deprived community cannot have the endpoint of returning to chronic deprivation: so what is its endpoint? Roughly, it is an as-you-should-be endpoint: to provide an environment for inhabitants to live well. Thus resilient communities will be those that do this in the face of challenges. How can they be identified? One method uses statistical outliers, neighbourhoods that do better than would be expected on a range of outcomes given a range of stressors. This method tells us that a neighbourhood is resilient but not why it is. In response, a number of researchers have attributed characteristics to resilient communities; however, these generally fail to distinguish characteristics of a good community from those of a resilient one. Making this distinction is difficult and we have not seen it successfully done; more importantly, it is arguably unnecessary. There already exist approaches in Public Health to assessing and developing communities faced with chronic problems, typically tied to notions such as Social Capital. Communityresilience to chronic problems, if it makes sense at all, is likely to be a property that emerges from the various assets in a community such as human capital, built capital and natural capital. Summary - Public Health professionals working with deprived neighbourhoods would be better to focus on what neighbourhoods have or could develop as social capital for living well, rather than on the vague and tangential notion of community resilience.</p

Integrated working in children's centres: a user pathway analysis

The growth of Children’s Centres has seen the development of new ways of working with families by a variety of different workers. In this paper the authors report on a research project which examined how integrated working operates in practice within the different Children’s Centres in one local authority in England. The authors explore strengths and difficulties of integrated working, and demonstrate how the opportunities and challenges presented are negotiated by Children’s Centre workers and by more traditional service providers and professional groupings. The research project developed the user pathway model as a methodological tool to interrogate practice. Workshops were undertaken in 11 Children’s Centres where internal and external partners, comprised of different professional groupings, worked together to map the pathway taken through their services by a virtual user. Findings indicate that whilst examples of integrated ways of working did exist, difficulties were also experienced. These difficulties and successes impact both on the way in which the service user experiences the work of Children’s Centres and the outcomes that integrated working achieves. This paper shows how Children’s Centres can present new opportunities and integrated ways of working, but may be restrained by more traditional professional working practices and managerial arrangements