Building Your Organization’s Resilience Toolbox

Format

Individual Presentation

First Presenter's Institution

Sunrise of Philadelphia, Inc

First Presenter’s Email Address

mfradera@sunriseofphila.org

First Presenter's Brief Biography

Marina has spent nearly a decade serving Philadelphia as an educator, trainer, and funder. As a high school special education teacher, she provided differentiated instruction to 9th-12th grade students of Furness High School. She brings her expertise as facilitator and trauma sensitive professional to her work. She is certified by Lakeside Global Institute as a Trauma Competent Professional. Currently as the Director of Trauma and Curriculum with Sunrise, she supports trauma informed professional development at Sunrise and partner agencies. She also designs trauma sensitive lesson plans and curates resources to streamline the efforts of school-based staff. She holds a M.Ed. in secondary education from Chestnut Hill College with concentrations in Special Education and Language Arts and a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College.

Location

Session Four Breakouts (Scarbrough 3)

Strand #1

Head: Academic Achievement & Leadership

Strand #2

Heart: Social & Emotional Skills

Relevance

Head: This workshop offers concrete strategies for organizational strategic planning, aligning the components of protective factors (i.e., resilience) with the asset mapping process. This is a strengths based, systems approach that aims to impact youth as individuals, as well as the adults surrounding them, and the communities they navigate. Heart: Protective factors are defined as the malleable, research proven, qualities and circumstances which positively impact long term youth outcomes and build resilience (i.e., the continuum of ability to recover from adversity).

Brief Program Description

Sunrise of Philadelphia has combined Resiliency Theory with the strengths based approach of asset mapping to anchor long-term strategic planning with youth and staff wellbeing at its core. We will share this strategy for counterbalancing Adverse Childhood Experiences and the broader traumatic impact of COVID-19 by intentionally investing in protective factors as a way to build resilience among staff members, youth participants, and across our organization overall.

Summary

Projections of the short-term and long-term impacts of COVID-19 tell us to expect an increase in mental health concerns and a learning loss among youth. We know that the social emotional needs of students and staff will need to be supported in order for productive academic learning to take hold. In the process of becoming more trauma informed, Sunrise of Philadelphia has aimed to establish non clinical strategies to address social emotional needs in youth programming.

Often, protective factors are organically incorporated into direct service based activities with youth promoting Social Emotional Learning and Life Skills. This, however, ignores the potential of a broader “ecological system” approach to youth development. We have implemented a process we call Resilience Mapping as a way to identify purposeful social emotional learning for youth of all ages and targeted professional development opportunities to increase adult competency and decrease turnover. We aim to share how to conduct this mapping, examples of how it has helped our organization.

Evidence

Berry, T., Teachanarong-Aragon, L., Sloper, M., Bartlett, J., & Steber, K. (2019). Promising practices for building protective and promotive factors to support positive youth development in afterschool. http://www.cgu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Berry_LAsBest_WhitePaper.pdf

Key Relevance: Claremont Evaluation Center and Child Trends identify concrete ways the cultivation of youth protective factors can positively impact students in the “Protective Factors Afterschool” Project, initiated by the LA’s BEST afterschool enrichment program. Several evidence-informed after school practices can help to build protective and promotive factors in the lives of youth, supporting positive youth outcomes. As they state, “Using an ecological systems approach to build protective and promotive factors in afterschool is useful because it offers afterschool programs important opportunities to consider how the practices they engage in—both at an organizational and staff level—can help support the development of malleable protective and promotive factors across multiple levels of a child’s ecology, including the individual, family, school, and community level.” They underscore that “afterschool programs can support positive youth development and prevent poor youth outcomes by building multiple protective and promotive factors that are both proximal (individual, parent and other caregivers, peers) and distal (school, community) to the child.” Evidence based practices identified as easy for afterschool programs include intentional hiring criteria, building organizational relationships across networks (e.g., schools, teachers, families, peer organizations, etc.).

Sedge, R., Bethell, C., Linkenbach, J., Jones, J. A., Klika, B., & Pecora, P. J. (2017). Balancing Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) With HOPE. Casey Family Programs. https://cssp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Balancing-ACEs-with-HOPE-FINAL.pdf

Key Relevance: This report underscores the importance of the “full spectrum of positive experiences” for youth “in their primary relationships and environments,” including the fact that “childhood resilience promotes thriving child health and modifies the effects of adversity,” and that the “presence of childhood protective factors decreases the well-known effects of child adversity.” A key recommendation for the public is the establishment of “policies to generate opportunities for parents, communities, and society to advance positive experiences for all children.” Though the long term goal is to implement such policies system level via government legislation, however youth serving organizations don’t need to wait to implement such policies within their programs and operations.

Learning Objective 1

Identify key concepts of trauma, resilience, asset mapping, and protective factors

Learning Objective 2

Understand how to apply Resilience Mapping during organizational strategic planning as a tool to assess and plan for youth programming

Learning Objective 3

Generate program or organization specific Resilience Maps

Keyword Descriptors

youth, strategic planning, organizational leadership, resilience, protective factors

Presentation Year

2023

Start Date

3-7-2023 8:30 AM

End Date

3-7-2023 9:45 AM

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Mar 7th, 8:30 AM Mar 7th, 9:45 AM

Building Your Organization’s Resilience Toolbox

Session Four Breakouts (Scarbrough 3)

Sunrise of Philadelphia has combined Resiliency Theory with the strengths based approach of asset mapping to anchor long-term strategic planning with youth and staff wellbeing at its core. We will share this strategy for counterbalancing Adverse Childhood Experiences and the broader traumatic impact of COVID-19 by intentionally investing in protective factors as a way to build resilience among staff members, youth participants, and across our organization overall.