Resilience

Dr. Lloyd Sederer has provided another interesting article in the Huffington Post - Resilience and Responsibility -- A  Commentary by Dr. Lloyd Sederer.  Belonging and its relationship to resilience is a thread weaving through the new Belonging - Living Ties website that Al Etmanski is working on.

Here's an excerpt that captures the essence of the article, "The Michael Oher story is remarkable; it also offers important insights into the limits of institutional responses to our basic need for belonging. While we need government to support social safety nets, we also need families and communities to redeem their neighborhoods and the lives in peril on every corner."

Like the many writers quoted by Jacques, I too wonder how successfully we will reduce our collective carbon emissions without a corresponding understanding of the social ‘glue’ of belonging.

There appears to be a token admission of the importance of the social in phrases like triple bottom line often depicted as a stool with 3 legs (financial/environmental/social). However this intellectual awareness has not traveled too far from the brain into concrete action.

Plan Institute, L'Arche Canada and L'Agora formally launched an inspirational body of thought and dialogue, in the form of a website, entitled Belonging - Living Ties. 

The homepage hosts this quote from Jean Vanier,

"The longer we journey on the road to inner healing and wholeness, the more the sense of belonging grows and deepens. The sense is not just one of belonging to others and to a community. It is a sense of belonging to the universe, to the earth, to the air, to the water, to everything that lives, to all humanity."

The opening of this new website is accompanied by timely blog posts by Jacques Dufresne, Al Etmanski and Nathan Ball each addressing the UN Summit on Climate Change taking place in Copenhagen.

Simon Fraser University's Imagine BC and workshop co-sponsors PLAN Institute for Caring Citizenship and the Centre for Community Enterprise present Linking Social and Ecological Resilience to Strengthen the Environment.

Excerpt

Many groups of people who are marginalized today have a history of their people that gives an explanation of present day reality. For example, African-Americans and African-Canadians have stories that tell how their ancestors were enslaved and brought to North America. Stories tell how some were guided by maps encoded into songs as they traveled the "underground railroad" and escaped to freedom.

Excerpt