SESSION 1: Urgency, Core Principles, and Benefits of Organizing Community-led Initiatives that Use a Public Health Approach to Build Population Mental Wellness and Transformational Resilience for the Climate Emergency
PRESENTER: Bob Doppelt, ITRC Coordinator
PRESENTATION: Session 1 Slides
PROGRAM:
Group introductions via small group breakout rooms.
Overview of "climate overshoot" and the resulting individual, community, and societal mental health and psychosocial impacts (or traumas).
Using the “social-ecological model to understand, prevent, and heal individual, community, and societal traumas, and how this differs from an individualized clinical approach.
Why is it essential to use a public health approach in communities to strengthen mental wellness and transformational resilience for the climate crisis.
Key principles and practices of using a public health approach to build mental wellness and transformational resilience in communities for the climate crisis: a) focus on the entire population--all adults, adolescents, and young children--using a combination of “proportionate universalism” and “life-course” approaches; b) prioritize the prevention of mental health and psychosocial problems and embed group and community-minded healing activities within the prevention strategies; c) engage wide and diverse networks of local residents, civic groups, and non-profit, private, and public sector leaders in planning, implementing, and continually improving strategies that enhance existing local protective factors (or assets); and form additional ones, to build everyone’s capacity for mental wellness and transformational resilience, as residents also engage in actions that help reduce the climate crisis to manageable levels.
How inequality reduces resilience and how strengthening population mental wellness and transformational resilience builds social connections and, in other ways, reduces inequality.