What is Resilience?

The word ‘resilience’ has many different definitions and means different things to different people.  Whilst we welcome debate and discussion about the word resilience, we also think it is important to state clearly what our understanding of the word is.

The ‘Resilience Revolution’ draws on the original concept of Resilient Therapy and its associated inequalities-related research developed by Professor Angie Hart and collaborators.  The definition of resilience that is associated with this approach is;

“Overcoming adversity, whilst also potentially changing, or even dramatically transforming, (aspects of) that adversity.” (Hart et al., 2016, p. 3)

Or in other words; “Beating the odds, whilst also changing the odds”.

Beating the odds means we believe, with a little help, anybody can bounce forward and up through tough times.

Changing the odds is about making Blackpool a more resilient town to grow up in. So people have fewer challenges in life and less to deal with, like not having enough money to live, or not having good enough housing. 

There is loads of information about Resilient Therapy and the definitions of resilience on the Boingboing website.