RESOURCES
7 Cs of Resilience Another approach to think about is building resilience skills. Kenneth Ginsburg, MD MS, Ed, FAAP developed the 7 Cs of Resilience model to utilize young people’s strengths to support them in their development so they can bend in adversity rather than break.
1. Competence
is to allow young people to experience the struggle within the system and let them recover on their own and learn from it.
2. Confidence
means young people believe in their own abilities. Adults can help young people by recognizing the effort they put in rather than focusing on only the results.
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Action Forum for Youth 2021 is hosted by Influence the Choice in partnership with the Issaquah Schools Foundation, the Lake Washington Schools Foundation, and both Issaquah and Lake Washington School Districts. It’s a community event, which is held every two years to coincide with the release of the Healthy Youth Survey Data. Its focus is to join youth and adult community leaders to explore the challenges facing today's youth and create sustainable solutions. This year’s focus is on understanding students’ current mental health needs and finding the solutions to the challenge facing today’s youth. Jerry Blackburn, former Executive Director of Influence the Choice, started explaining the data and resources used today regarding youth experiences and what adults can do to support youth in developing resilience. The goal is to help young people navigate not only the current crisis but also the crisis that they might experience as young people going forward. Therefore, there are two approaches that adults or the community can take to support young people. One approach is the crisis response. Learn to respond to any crisis from a growth mindset standpoint. Appreciate the nature of it as profound, accept the reality, and do everything to access support systems. In the end, develop a community and make connections around it so that people can get to a place where they have the capacity to deal with the next level of adversity, which our young people will experience. This is a skill set that youth will need as they venture out into the world.
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3. Connection
is to support close ties and belonging and help young people make connections in the community.
4. Character
is to support value/spiritual development and opportunities to care for others and encourage empathy, acceptance, and inclusion.
Contribution means being of service to others and having the capacity to step away from their own experience and put yourself in the arena of another individual to support them to be successful. 5.
6. Coping is to support/model healthy strategies
by encouraging a growth mindset and letting them make decisions. Adults are really role models for healthy demonstrations of resilience and capacity.
7. Control
means to let young people have a locus of control so that they can develop the skill sets and capacities to believe in their ability to succeed. Show them their power, which might change their experiences and the experiences of others in a healthy way and maintain high expectations. Overall, as adults, our job is to let our young people know that we unconditionally care in these responses whether they fall and get up or continue struggling. What’s most important for adults to know? Our young people are resilient but not everybody is in the same boat. Together we can give young people everything that they need going forward so that they are able to bend rather than break. We want them to be successful. It’s the mission for all of us.
