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PREFACE
This book
challenges a widely accepted myth about
people, especially young people, who experience
risks, stress, trauma, and adversity in
their lives. Contrary to popular opinion,
the majority of these individuals do,
over time, bounce back from their problems
and do well. There is a growing body of
scientific research from several fields
that documents this fact and yields important
information as to what can be done to
facilitate this process of overcoming.
In 1996,
a middle school teacher and two social
workers, convinced that the extensive
national focus on risks, deficits, and
pathologies obscured this truth took one
of the biggest risks of their professional
lives. With only a few hundred dollars,
but a wealth of conviction about the need
to publicize and make practical the research
findings of the self-righting capacity
within all, Nancy Sharp-Light, Bonnie
Benard, and I founded what became a leading
publication on moving youth, families,
and communities from risk to resiliency.
Little did we realize that within three
short years the journal we began, Resiliency
In Action: Bouncing Back from Risk and
Adversity: Ideas for Youth Families,
and Communities would gain an audience
of subscribers in almost every state in
the country, as well as in Puerto Rico,
Canada, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand,
Malaysia, Samoa, Israel, and Portugal.
This book
is a direct result of the enthusiastic
response the journal received. Rather
than meet the requests of our readers
for reprints of many single issues of
Resiliency In Action, we decided
to compile a book of “the best” of all
the issues. [Subsequently, due to the
popularity of this book, we discontinued
publishing the journal to focus all of
our energy on publishing books and other
resiliency resources.]
Our goal
in starting the journal, and reprinting
it in a book format, was a simple one:
Share the results of the dozens of scientific
studies that have emerged in the past
decade showing specifically how people,
families, and even organizations overcome
risk, trauma, and adversity to go on to
life success, in a practical, reader-friendly
format. We wanted to make the researchers
themselves human through one-to-one interviews
that included their heart-to-heart advice
as to how to best foster resiliency. We
also wanted to spotlight the many individuals
and schools and community groups we knew
that were integrating the results of this
research and finding significant improvements
in emotional, behavioral, and academic
outcomes. Finally, we wanted to highlight
the lives of young people whose personal
stories demonstrate the reality of resilient
overcoming.
In short,
we learned so much about how to help foster
this process of resilient overcoming by
studying the research documenting exactly
how it happens and talking with people
and organizations making it happen, we
wanted everyone who cares about kids,
families, and communities to know what
we had learned. Of course in the process
of making our goal a reality, we have
learned-along with, and from, our readers-much
more.
The hopeful
information about the capacity for resiliency
and how to foster it has been publicized
in several otherleading publications since
we began Resiliency In Action. It was
the cover story in the November 11, 1996
issue of U.S. News and World Report, the
November, 1997 issue of Principal Magazine,
and the June, 1998 Psychology Today. Extensive
examination of the resiliency framework
has also appeared in journals for psychologists,
social workers, family therapist, and
other youth-serving professionals during
this time. In 1998, Martin Seligman, Ph.D.,
a resiliency researcher and then President
of the American Psychological Association,
stated that the entire field of psychology
is moving away from the deficit approach
to a strengths-based model.
The reason
for the growing popularity of the resiliency
approach to viewing and helping others
is, I believe, an increasing awareness
best expressed to me by a resilient young
man who had spent most of his life in
dozens of foster homes enduring tremendous
risk, trauma, and adversity. What
helped the most, he told me, were those
people along the way who gave him the
message, “What is right with you is more
powerful than anything that is wrong with
you.”
The truth
of this message, which has often been
missing in the deficit-based models of
the past, is at the heart of the growing
support for the resiliency approach. Resiliency
In Action is dedicated to showing how
to recognize, nurture, and utilize the
“power of what is right” to transform
the lives of children and youth, families,
and communities.
Nan Henderson
San Diego
CA
January,
1999
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