ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
00:00:07Hi everybody, and welcome to the Community is Medicine Webinar. We're going to start in one minute. So just hang in there for a second if you would. Thank you. Well. Hello, everyone. Uh, my name is Bob dapple. I coordinate the International Transformational Resilience Coalition IITRC for short. Uh, and I want to welcome you all to the webinar on community is medicine. Uh, the urgent need and many benefits of using a public health approach in communities to prevent and heal climate traumas and many other traumas. Um, uh, we are recording this session and it will be available on our the IITRC and the Campaign for Trauma Informed Policy and Practice websites afterwards. We're also going to we're not going to take questions at the end of this session. But if you put your set your questions in chat, and also just very briefly, if you're interested, share who you are, where you're from, etc. in chat. Um, we will respond to questions and send everybody an email. Who's on the webinar? Uh, afterwards, uh, with responses to the questions you raised. So, um, and I want to welcome you no matter what time zone you're in. I know we have some people from Europe. Uh, I think a couple from Africa and many from us and, uh, Canada on the, uh, on the session. So, uh, let me start by just talking a little bit about the ITRC and what, what this webinar is going to be about. We started ten years ago, actually a little over ten years ago now, 2013, um, after Superstorm Sandy hit the east coast of the US and we saw mental health problems skyrocket, uh, in New York and New Jersey and Connecticut. Uh, we were working the ITRC was working down in there. My organization was working down in Southeast Florida. We saw the same impacts down there. And that led us to realize, because I have a grounding in climate science as well as in mental health, that the climate emergency was going to get a lot worse. Uh, and so we needed to get out in front of these issues. That's how the ITRC was formed. Um, we've been running webinars and training workshops on how to build resilience, uh, for adverse conditions. And, uh, about four years ago, uh, a number of our members came to us and said, we have to come up with a different approach to address these issues because we're seeing, uh, extreme weather events, disasters, emergencies and stresses all over the world. We can't keep up with the current given the current approach, which is predominantly treating individuals after they experienced trauma. We can't keep up with that. We need a new approach. So that launch day, what we thought was going to be a six month, uh, research project, we had a bunch of graduate students involved, turned out to be a two and a half year research project. The project that was fascinating. We talked with folks all over the world, and it turns out that there is an approach that we know can help prevent and heal the mental health and psychosocial problems generated by ongoing adversities, which is what the climate emergency generates, and that is a public health approach to mental wellness and resilience. At least that's what we call it in Western countries. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Once we realized that, we started running a community of practice, uh, on on training people and how to use a public health approach, uh, to mental wellness and resilience. And we've done that for three years, and our fourth one is starting in two weeks. And I'll talk about that in a second. We also realized that many of these community based initiatives that already exist, that are doing this kind of work, not necessarily focused on the climate emergency, they struggle for funding to get off the ground, to keep the and to continue to mature to the point that they're really effective. So we went to the US Congress, uh, and got the Community Mental Wellness Resilience Act introduced. Uh, and I'm going to talk a little bit about that that will fund, help fund and support these community based initiatives. And I just started writing a Psychology Today column or regular column about these issues. And also there's published a book last year about it called Preventing and Healing Climate Trauma as a Guide to Building Resilience and Hope in communities. I'm going to talk about that at the end also. So you have more resources. So let's talk about the distressing news first. And then we're going to get into the constructive and positive news. Um, we know that there's all sorts of traumas and toxic stresses affecting people today. Uh, and uh, from job and economic struggles to poverty to racism, uh, to political, uh, extremism and violence and other sorts of things, but to these many other traumatic stressors, we have to add the climate ecosystem and biodiversity catastrophe that is already and will increasingly affect every aspect of society. Now I'm using the term catastrophe not to sensationalize the issue, but in terms used in disaster sociology. In disaster sociology, an emergency is a short term event caused by a single factor that has limited geographic and social consequences. Disasters. In contrast, have a longer time frame, and much larger impacts. Uh, often involve multiple causes, uh, but they are characterized as single events that eventually end and give people time to recover. A catastrophe, however, is an event that has multiple interacting impacts that are very substantial and widespread, that build on themselves and are often cumulative and have many unforeseen, surprising consequences. Consequently, they're much more severe and complicated and prolonged than an emergency and disasters. And what that means is, most importantly, you don't respond to or manage a catastrophe in the same way you do an emergency or a disaster because they are more complicated, severe, widespread, cumulative and prolonged. That's what's happening with the climate emergency. It's not just an atmospheric problems. The atmospheric changes in global temperatures and the energy balance and the climate system is impacting ecological systems and biodiversity, which is also feeding back to the impact, the climate system. So, uh, and it is a catastrophe. It is a prolonged, widespread, severe and cumulative uh, uh, experience we're having. Um, and mostly what we've been doing so far, at best, is preparing to respond to, uh, events, serious disasters and events that end and give people time to recover. But global warming is, uh, a global climate ecosystem. Biodiversity catastrophe is clearly a catastrophe, and it requires a very different type of response. Uh, if we don't do this, the left unaddressed, this catastrophe is going to create an epidemic of traumas all over the world. And to address it, we must proactively build what we call population transformational resilience, not just treat individuals after they're traumatized or react to the next disaster. Our hope that strengthening and enhancing external physical resilience is sufficient for what we face. Well, just very briefly, what are some of those impacts that we're going to see? The most pervasive impacts, the ones that are most widespread and severe are cascading disruptions to the ecological, social and economic systems people rely on for basic needs that in different times and ways and magnitudes, will emotionally distress all of us. And that's food, water and resource shortages or disruptions, job and income losses, new illnesses and diseases, loss of place, community culture, loss of the natural environment, disruptions of close family and friends, social networks, involuntary migration, being forced to move because of drought or floods or wildfires. And then in migration, people coming in that other people don't want to have in their community. Heat disaster triggered crime, aggression and violence. Worrying about our our future and our children futures and many other sort of surprising, never ending stress pileups and those stress pileups caused by those those cascading disruptions to the core systems we all rely on for basic needs are sometimes activated by, and other times accelerated by, more frequent, extreme and prolonged disasters that traumatize millions of people. 20 to 40% of people who are directly impacted can be traumatized, including ten to, uh, in addition to 10 to 20% of the emergency responders or people who know someone who's impacted or even view the events from afar, um, uh, and many other unforeseen ones. And so ultimately, everyone is going to be impacted by the climate ecosystem, biodiversity catastrophe. This is a population level problem. We have to understand that. But in the near term, in different times, ways and magnitude, there are some populations and some individuals that are at greater risk Bipoc residents, low income residents, migrants, ethnic minorities, single women, young children, people living alone, the elderly, people in insecure housing, those living in high risk zones, people with preexisting conditions, first responders and which it means that climate impacts are aggravating existing inequalities and injustices, and adding many new ones that even greater and greater impacts on many of these groups. But beware, be careful as to how you approach this, because only focusing on the quote unquote vulnerable groups and populations can allow wealthier people to think, well, it's not going to affect me, and I've got enough resources, etc., to be immune from what's happening. So I don't need to cut my emissions. I don't need to do anything about the climate emergency. This is just about vulnerable populations, which is obviously not true. And so left unaddressed what we're already seeing around the world. Uh uh. And will increasingly see as a global epidemic of individual, community and societal distresses and traumas. What do I mean by that? Psychological, emotional, and spiritual distresses can be considered an understandable and normal response associated with stressors and demands that are difficult to cope with, or the result from witnessing others and harmful situations, or fantasizing about future impacts. This is what climate anxiety is about, and I just wrote a column for Psychology Today about that. Given an ice storm, uh, we just experienced here where I live. Individual trauma is a little different. It's can be defined as a blow to the psyche that breaks through one's defenses with such brutal force that one cannot react to it effectively. And as so often happens in catastrophes, people withdraw into themselves. They feel numb, afraid, vulnerable, and very alone. This is a great definition of trauma by Kyle Erickson. We in the mental health and social service world, which I think most of the people who registered for the webinar are from not all, but most, um, we understand distresses and traumas, but we don't understand community and societal trauma quite as well. Uh, and they are just as important. So what is it, a community trauma? Uh, it's an event or series. An event that is a basic blow to the social tissue of social life, that it damages the bonds that attach people together and leaves them with an impaired sense of community. It's a gradual realization that the community no longer exists as an effective sort of source of support, and important part of the self has disappeared. Societal trauma goes beyond a specific geographic area, or a group with a shared identity to affect entire cultures, nations, or all of humanity. The Covid 19 pandemic is a classic societal trauma. When a community burns down in a historic wildfire that, like happened in Lahaina, Hawaii, a number of months ago, that's a that can create the community wide trauma. Uh, and we're seeing more of these around the world. And if we leave these issues unaddressed, the climate ecosystem, biodiversity catastrophe will be the greatest societal trauma modern society has ever experienced. And I want to also emphasize that there is no physical health without mental health. So we have these, uh, individual, uh, community and societal traumas, these mental health issues, but they also affect our physical health. This is a quote from Doctor Brooke Brock Chisholm, who was the first director of the World Health Organization. That is, comorbidity, as it's called, is very common adverse social, psychological, emotional, behavioral conditions often aggravate existing or directly produce new physical health problems. Heart disease, diabetes, cancers, and other sorts of health problems and physical health problems can come back to create mental health issues. Uh, so again, if we leave these issues unaddressed, widespread stresses and traumas are going to greatly accelerate physical health problems as well as the cost associated with them. And pervasive traumas tend to feed on themselves and become epidemic. Epidemic. And that's because what unaddressed trauma becomes buried in our nervous system that causes us to to remain in a constant fight or flight. Protective reaction that leads people to deny what's happening, dissociate, disconnect themselves from the world and what's happening. Blame others, attack others, self-sabotage, reenact the same patterns over and over, trying to work it out in their own mind. And it's seen time and again throughout history. These reactions can unravel families, groups, communities, and entire societies. And we are seeing that in many places already, including here in the US. And finally, these flight or flight protective reactions resulting from continued the continued activation of the emotional brain, the fear and alarm center of our brain, the limbic system that also is blocking climate solutions. Because when people are in this protective fight or flight mode, anything that seems like a threat, including rising prices, a shift from fossil fuels to clean energy, whatever they oppose that it's too much stress. It's too much trouble. Uh, and so it's it it really, uh, really is is a serious problem. In fact, what we see in many places is it's not so much ideology, political ideology that that causes many people to oppose new climate policies as much as that if things have gone wrong in people's lives and they they oppose a change in that sense. And this is happening just at the time. When solutions to the climate ecosystem biodiversity require catastrophe, require constant learning, growth, adaptation and innovation. So just when we need this kind of innovation, we're actually frozen in place because people are in this fight or flight protective mode. So I just want to emphasize and I'll talk about this again in a second. There is no community resilience without human, social, psychological and emotional resilience. It is essential that we slash greenhouse gas emissions and strengthen external physical resilience and restore ecosystems. But they are likely, and we've seen it already to have limited effect. Uh, and less an equal or greater emphasis is placed on strengthening the human, social, psychological and emotional dimensions of resilience. Those two things have to be coupled and integrated together. Yet in the US and many other, especially wealthier nations, higher income nations, mental health issues have been privatized. What do I mean by that? The dominant paradigm is at the individual alone is responsible for the psychological, emotional, behavioral struggles. And the correct approach, consequently, is to treat individuals mostly one at a time, only after they experience symptoms of troubles. But if this makes sense, how is it possible that mental health and psychosocial struggles have continually grown over the last decade or more to points where they're now epidemic? I think everybody would acknowledge that we're facing an epidemic of these problems. How is that possible? All the individuals somehow had something going wrong with them. Uh, and the existing individualized paradigm and our systems that support it restrict the discourse to only what fits within it. So it's been difficult to talk about a much more broader and different approach. But the reality is climate traumas and many other of the mental health psychosocial problems, behavioral health problems we see today, we could call traumas result from interacting individual, family, social, economic and ecological factors. This is called the social ecological model. You can get it on the web, lots of information about it that the individual is clearly affected by their genetics, uh, clearly, and their attitudes, their childhood experiences. But that's influenced by their connections with families, friends and social networks, which is all influenced by their community in which they live, the conditions of their neighborhood, the workplaces, schools, voluntary and civic groups, spiritual groups all of that is shaped and influenced by structural factors, policies, institutions, power relationships, the kind of services that are available, and all of that is shaped by the environment in which that surrounds people. The conditions of food and water, open space, green space, the physical built system, economic and ecological systems. Uh, and research shows that these systems, many of these systems or aspects of are now dysfunctional today and interact in multi systemic ways. All these multi systemic factors are interacting to create widespread emotional distresses and traumas in the US and worldwide. Uh, and so to address these multi systemic factors, we've got to get out of our silos, our professional silos, our work silos, etc., and begin to think systemically and respond holistically. But if we take this path, we have seen that the climate ecosystem, biodiversity catastrophe can activate deep seated transformational changes. And that's what I want to focus on now. We must proactively build what we call population level capacity for transformational resilience. What does this mean when suffering is caused by previously unseen external forces that have no endpoint, no resolution or simple cure, and that is the climate ecosystem biodiversity catastrophe? The priority must be to help everyone develop the capacity to buffer themselves from and push back against those stressors, and at the same time find constructive new sources of meaning, purpose, courage, and hope in life. Because the way we found meaning and purpose and hope are not necessarily going to be the same way as we can do that, we can same we can find in the future. So what do we mean by transformation? Resilience. We need to help everyone strengthen their capacity for presence ING or self-regulation, which is to calm their body, mind, and emotions and behaviors in the midst of adversities. Um, it's our sympathetic nervous system that's activated. We're in that we're in those fight or flight reactions, those defensive reactions. And so presence activates the parasympathetic nervous system to calm, uh, our, our sympathetic nervous system just to calm ourselves. Um, and, uh, and when we get that in control enough also Purposing. So presence and Purposing Purposing is adversity based growth that is using adversities to keep learning and adapting to find new sources of meaning, purpose, hope and courage in life and what we've seen and I think most of you who are attending, well, if you think about it, look back on your life and find that there's probably some of the times when you did this to the combination of calming yourself, calming your emotions and your body and your behaviors and finding new meaning, purpose and hope and life can really, uh, combine to rebuild faith in the future. And that's what's really needed. And the capacity for transformation. Resilience is also shaped by those interacting individual, family, social, economic, physical, built and ecological conditions. We have to address them all, which means we have to respond at the scale of the challenges we now face, which we know are very large. And this means we must work at and think and work at the population level by actively engaging neighborhoods and communities. And this was reaffirmed by a comment from the noted pioneer clinical psychologist, Doctor George Albee, a number of years back, who said no epidemic has ever been resolved by paying attention to the treatment of the affected individual. Now, this is a psychologist. He's talking about mental health issues. He's not a physical health person who's talking about a disease of some kind. He's saying even with this kind of an epidemic with mental health issues, we we can't just pay attention to the individual. And when we were doing our research on these issues. This key point led us to determine that, uh, we must address the population level, multi systemic factors. Uh, by expanding our approach to mental health and mental wellness that exist today in the US and in many other wealthier nations, to prioritize a public health approach to mental wellness and transformational resilience. So what is the public health approach to mental wellness and resilience? A public health approach to mental wellness or resilience takes a population level approach, as we've been talking about, not one that merely focuses on individuals with symptoms of pathology or high risk groups, though they must absolutely be fully included by using what's called proportionate universalism and life course approaches. You can look those up. I don't have time to talk about those there, but our mantra really has to be leave no one behind. A public health approach to mental wellness. Resilience prioritizes preventing problems before they emerge, not merely reacting to or trying to treat them after they appear, and it integrates group and community minded healing methods into the prevention strategies their combined. So we must always remember that prevention is the cure. And a public health approach to mental wellness and transformation. Resilience achieves these goals by strengthening protective factors, social support networks, resilience, skills, habits, local resources, etc. that build and sustain healthy thinking and behaviors even in the midst of adversities. Not just trying to fix deficits or treating individuals as symptoms of pathology. So again, we must build strength, social connections and resources, not just treat individuals with symptoms of pathology. Research shows that mental health, mental wellness and transformation resilience can be enhanced and that the most effective way to do that is to establish the horizontal social infrastructure in communities that we call a resilience coordinating network. There's all sorts of variations of this name. Sometimes it's resilience task force, sometimes it's a steering committee, sometimes it's a board, but it's a coordinating network. And I'll explain why we use that term. But it engages a broad and diverse array of local, grassroots and neighborhood leaders, voluntary leaders, civic leaders, the YMCA, schools, business groups, etc., as well as private, nonprofit and public human services, social services, and all types of other organizations in jointly planning and implementing multi systemic strategies of what we mean, strategies that address all of those different kinds of factors that are creating the traumas and stresses in communities. Um, so those strategies that strengthen as many drivers of individual and collective mental wellness and resilience as possible in the community, each community is going to be different. They're addressing different issues. So here's a sample ideal resilience coordinating network. It's actually made up of one that we we work with and know about. Um, but you could call this well coordinated decentralization using a ring team or a hub and spoke approach. So in the center circle, you see, um, around the center circle there's neighborhood leaders are involved. They come together with private sector civic leaders. I'm going down to the right hand side. Youth leaders, public sector leaders, mental health and human services leaders, nonprofit faith leaders, uh, a whole diverse array of folks. And each one's going to be different. And they might elect co-chair and executive committee to make ongoing daily decisions. And if they're lucky, they actually have paid staff who can coordinate all this. Uh, they come together and develop this this, uh, the strategies. How do we work with neighborhood leaders, how do we work with youth, etc.? And so outside of this of the formal steering committee, there are what we call different resilience innovation teams working with different populations or sectors. So up in the upper right hand corner, there might be one that's working with neighborhood groups and then going down to the right, another one with working with the private sector or with youth groups or with the educational system, uh, or with the public organizations or with human services programs and climate adaptation works and community leader innovation teams, etc. they're all developing their own strategies, um, working with the populations or in the sectors they work in. But they come back and they share what their strategies are and what they're doing with the broader steering committee, and they get feedback on their strategies, they say. So an education group might say, well, we've got these. We really developed ways to engage the educational system in our community in building mental wellness resilience. But somebody might raise a hand then and say, well, you know, about 15%, 10% of our community, the kids in our community are getting private, schooled, homeschooled. Have you thought about how to engage them? Oh, no, we haven't. Okay. So let's figure out a way to do that. Um, that's the advantage that but they also share fundraising strategies, sometimes coordinate them, sometimes separated them enough to be able to distinguish them. So they both need to dip money different groups and get, uh, funding. So again, it's well coordinated decentralization. And there's a whole bunch of organizations, communities using this approach in different variations of it around the US and internationally. So why do we need this ongoing kind of resilience coordinating networks? Here's the six common phases of disasters. Uh, that will help us think about as there's the on the left side, you can see there's the pre disaster stage is often warnings. Uh, it might be a uh a earthquake. And we, you know, you get a day or two or longer warming with the climate emergency. We've had decades and decades of warning. Then the impacts happen. And as we said before, they can directly traumatize 20 to 40% of the people who are directly impacted and 10 to 20% of others. Then you go through the heroic phase where people step forward and help out others they don't even know, never met. They put their lives on the line often to help others, and then after the impacts sort of fade, it's sort of at the end of the impact phase, and often for a month or two, sometimes longer. It goes into the community cohesion or what's often called the honeymoon phase of disaster that can last just a few days or weeks or months. People come together who don't know each other. They help each other. They provide food, shelter, um, clothing, uh, heat, whatever it might be. Uh, and people who often don't even like each other work together, uh, in this phase. But then eventually people have to go back and run and deal with their own lives. Uh, and that community cohesion phase ends, and they enter what's called the disillusionment phase. And this can last for months or years. Uh, and this is when most of the mental health and psychosocial, uh, behavioral problems emerge. Uh, because people are now on their own. Uh, and as you can see, it just goes down. Some people remain dysregulated forever. After months or years, people, most will then begin to recover, assuming there's not another disaster or severe stress that they experienced. So the recovery phase starts. But again, another, uh, stress or disaster can a cause regression or prevent recovery? Um, and why do we need this resilience coordinate networks? Because the climate ecosystem, biodiversity catastrophe is going to continue and accelerate for decades. Most mental health and psychosocial problems emerge months or long after the extreme stresses or direct impacts of disasters occur. So we need to build the horizontal infrastructure in our neighborhoods and communities needed to sustain that community cohesion phase for decades to come. That's what a resilience coordinating network ultimately does. It really, uh, extends that rather than allowing it to be to dissipate over time? But we completed extensive research into what are the five core protective factors, if you will, that are really going to be needed to build population level, capacity for transformation, resilience for the climate ecosystem, biodiversity catastrophe. And I want to briefly share those with you. By far the most important is to build, quote unquote, strong and weak social connections across cultural, economic, racial and geographic boundaries in the community. By strong and weak, we mean strong, our close friend, connections with family and friends. We are sort of, you know, you get, you know, other people and you have some relationships with them, but you don't share your personal issues with them, etc. they're weaker, but they're both very important. It's often called bonding, bridging or linking social support networks and building these social connections is vital to address the toxic social isolation and loneliness that is generating profound mental health problems today. And family, friends and neighbors are usually far more important than first responders during the first 3 to 5 days, and often much longer of many disasters. Social connections are especially important in times of crisis because they provide the emotional safety and practical support needed for health and resilience. And just as importantly, in doing this, some people find meaning and purpose in their lives that they hadn't had before by assisting others in their community or in their neighborhood. Uh, we just experienced this. Exactly. And where I live in Oregon, when we got hit the two weeks ago by and it's record, uh, ice storm, uh, uh, people couldn't get out, couldn't go anywhere, first responders couldn't get out very much. Uh, and it was families, friends, families and neighbors who were taking care of each other, providing food, providing shelter, making sure people had heat, etc.. Uh, and this is, this is just really important to do. Uh, and there's exciting programs going on around internationally and into the US on different ways to build these social connections. Just as importantly, um, is to build, to ensure a just transition by engaging residents and creating zero emission, climate resilient, physical, built economic and ecological conditions. There are programs underway. Many of you under who are watching the webinar might be involved in, uh, a greenhouse gas reduction program or, uh, community resilience building, uh, external physical resilience building program. Uh, but they tend to be siloed from everything else. They're just doing your thing. There's mental health, mental wellness and other things to doing other things. But it's really vital to to bring these all together. So, uh, really trying to create locally owned and operated businesses that provide family wage jobs, healthy and safe public spaces, equitable transportation systems, restoring local forests and ecological systems, ample and safe housing, etc.. Uh, this is critical, and it's vital to engage people, residents directly in this. Not just have a nonprofit or a government agency or a private organization do the work and just get some feedback from residents that don't buy into it. And it's important because unhealthy local conditions create mental health and psychosocial problems. Unhealthy housing and transportation, lack of parks and open space, etc. polluted areas create mental health and psychosocial problems. But we know research shows and experience shows that active engagement by residents in creating healthier ingest conditions from the bottom up, meaning they're actively engaged, builds hope in people, which enhances resilience and add adaptability. While also integrating this external physical resilience and emission reductions with human, psychological, social and emotional resilience, and all the while reducing local emissions, strengthening external physical adaptation, and often creating social and political pressure for change. So I want to reiterate there is no community resilience without human, social, psychological and emotional resilience. Efforts to slash fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emission, restore ecosystems and build external physical resilience needs to be fully integrated into efforts to build population level mental wellness and transformation resilience. We can't continue this this siloed way in which we're operating. And the same thing is true for disaster preparedness and response, disaster, mental health and many other human services that will remain very important but will become much more effective when they're integrated into community led, resilience building initiatives. The third foundational area we identified in these. These are all interactive. I'll talk about that in a second, is to build, uh, foster universal literacy about mental wellness and transformation, resilience by helping everyone become trauma and resilience informed. And what this means is, uh, help everyone understand what happens in their body, minds and emotions and behaviors when they experience significant stress or an acute trauma, uh, that it causes those fight or flight or often freeze reactions when it's overwhelming. That puts us in this self defensive protective mode that creates emotional distresses, behaviors that are not very helpful, etc. and then to learn those presences and purchasing resilience skill that I talk about when, uh, when you teach everyone these skills, young kids, uh, adolescents and older folks, working age people, just basic understanding of this. It helps people understand what's happening within them and around them. Uh, which can normalize their struggles. Oh, there's nothing wrong with me. This is natural. It's built into my system, uh, reduces the fear of being stigmatized. If they talk about the mental health or psychosocial struggle, they're happening. Uh, and it also helps them eliminate being stigmatizing other people. While it builds the knowledge and skills needed to prevent and heal their own struggles, mental health and spiritual struggles, and motivating some people to find meaning and purpose in life by helping others become trauma and resilience informed. Uh, it's very powerful. Uh oh, I get it. Now I understand what's happening with me. I'm going to share this with others and help others understand it so they don't feel bad about themselves and feel like, uh, there's something fundamentally wrong with them. Uh, the fourth area we found that's going to be very important to for communities and neighbors to is to engage residents regularly, engage them in specific practices that enhance mental wellness and transformation. Resilience. Helping people laugh, often even in the midst of adversity. Find something to laugh about. Uh, just laughing about the human condition can often do it, uh, and finding simple joys. The birds that are flying through the, you know, above you. Or a flower that's growing. Just something simple. Taking care of the body, eating well, getting good exercise or physical exercise. Being grateful for what you have, uh, continual learning and practicing forgiveness. This is going to be really important as the climate emergency, uh, continues. Because, again, those fight, flight or freeze reactions that stress and trauma can create will cause people to do things that they that don't come out too well. And you want to practice forgiveness for them, but that's mostly for you. So you don't get all stressed out. And you also want to practice forgiveness for yourself because you're going to be doing things that looking back on it, you might say, why did world did I do that? So you have to practice forgiveness. But active engagement in these activities releases trauma from the nervous system, which helps prevent and heal them. While engaging in these activities with others can build social connections through pro-social activities. And often offering experiences that create emotional states that provide meaning to people. Uh, so practicing forgiveness can really provide people with a real, true sense of meaning in life, and it often motivates some people to find meaning and purpose in their life new meaning and purpose by helping others do this. So teaching others how to practice forgiveness or how to be grateful, that'd be grateful, or how to find simple joys. It can be a very powerful experience for people. And finally, the last area we've identified. And it took a lot of research to go through all this and look at the community programs going on around the world. Um, the fifth one is to establish ongoing, mostly peer led group and community minded opportunities to heal traumas. So up in the top, you see healing circles and other group methods where people come together with 5 to 100 other people, uh, facilitated by a peer, uh, trained peer who and they share what they're going through and they hear from others. Oh, they're going through something similar that that I'm going through. Oh, there's nothing wrong with me. A lot of people are dealing with this and oh, here's how these other people are dealing with it. Maybe I can try that too. And it builds social connections, builds those, but also build skills, helps people begin to release the trauma and heal. But their somatic methods or expressive therapies art, drama, music, dance, writing and more. Mindfulness based healing, spiritual healing, nature and animal theory, uh, and and memorial events are going to be very important in your community. Uh, the date of a major disaster or when something happened to memorialize that. And so people don't forget. And then you'll see down at the lower right hand corner, mental health treatments will remain important. Um, but they cannot be the dominant focus because there simply aren't enough mental health professionals, uh, available to help all the people that are traumatized. And many people over 50% won't engage in mental health treatment anyway because of fears of being stigmatized or the cost, uh, or just the location of where there's, uh, most of most of the providers are in urban or suburban areas, not, uh, rural areas, etc., etc. lots of reasons. Uh, so it'll remain important, but it can't be the dominant focus. But group, uh, communities can engage in these others all the time. And these healing methods normalize struggles and help eliminate fears of being stigmatized. When you're with a group of other people doing that, you don't feel it's not just me alone. Um, uh. While it allows people to hear how others view their struggles and approach their healing in a non-judgmental setting, and it builds the emotional safety net that helps people release their trauma, begin to heal, and remain resilient and adaptable. And that's really, again, adaptation. The ability to adapt to changing conditions is a core part of transformational resilience, uh, because we're going to have to keep doing that as the climate ecosystem biodiversity emergency gets worse, all while helping people find new meaning and purpose in their lives. Many times by being trained as a peer facilitator. I went through this process. Boy, was it helpful for me. I'm going to go get trained in how to help others do the same thing and run a group like this facilitated group. Well, again, these five foundational areas are interactive. Uh, you can start with anyone you want in different communities. Do start with different ones. Some start with just helping everyone become trauma informed and then they work on other other folks. So you start with whatever makes sense to the needs of your particular neighborhood or community, and then you can add others over time as you as you learn how to, to do that. But application to these five foundational focuses requires place based, community led initiatives, uh, that are focused on building widespread relationships horizontally in the community, not from the top down. To enhance voluntary interdependency, there's nobody forcing people to come together and plan and implement strategies and evaluate strategies and continually improvement. It's voluntary, uh, but focused on, uh, but all those strategies and that voluntary interdependence helps all residents feel listened to and cared for, and consequently, they're willing to take ownership in what's happening. It's not the nonprofit or the government agency that has ownership for this. It's the community members that have ownership. Here's a few examples of resilience coordinated networks in the US. Uh, North Carolina. Uh, Smart Start Healthy and Resilient Community Initiative now have 40 plus. And they're focused on four Aces, as they call adverse childhood experiences, adverse community experiences, adverse climate experiences, and atrocious cultural experience, they said. Virginia's trauma informed Community Networks has 32, uh, networks around the state that are building resilience in and preventing and mitigating the impacts of trauma in their communities. Peace for Tarpon and Tarpon Springs, Florida, was the first trauma informed community in the US. By Terry by Robin Sanger does great work. There's a community resilience initiative in Walla Walla, Washington. It's also one of the leaders in this. The San Francisco Neighbor Empowerment Network is now on hold. Has done some really fabulous work. Uh, Rhode Island Health Equity Zones is another example. There's over 200 associated with the Mark program mobilizing action for resilient communities. They're mostly focused on adverse childhood experiences, but they're in a report by the Health Federation of Philadelphia. You can get them on there online. And there's many others in the US. And then there's many international, uh, initiatives. Uh, and they're mostly called mental health and psychosocial support groups. So here's the definition of community based mental health. Psychosocial support approach puts individuals, communities and social systems at the center of the intervention in all phases of the response. Uh, this is by the interagency Standing Committee, community based approaches to mental health and psychosocial support programs. And you can go to their website, uh, the Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Network, for more information. And I work with a number of those groups now, and talking more and more about how we get these programs to focus on the climate emergency. So but only a few of the initiatives I just described just actually describe their work as a public health approach, but they're using it. Each is unique. There is no one size fits all approach. None address all of the five core foundational areas that I just mentioned. They focus on 1 or 2, and then they they move on and try to expand. And only a few are yet to be explicitly focused on the climate emergency. But they show how community is medicine, and that's really important. Community is medicine. Uh, and so if those that are not focused on the climate catastrophe begin to expand to address it, and we organize thousands of new of these community initiatives in the US, Canada, Europe and other places around the world, we can build universal capacity for transformation or resilience. And just want to emphasize that community led initiatives are key. Although well intentioned and helpful for some people, mental health services by trained professionals that treat individuals after symptoms appear. Which is what we dominantly do now. Programs focus on specific populations and isolation of others, which is also what we do, and projects run by NGOs or public agencies that get a grant and run a project for X amount of years. But they retained the decision making authority over what's happening in those, uh, can again, be very well intentioned and be positive, but they cannot build or sustain the population level capacity for transformation, resilience that's going to be needed for the decades long climate ecosystem, biodiversity, catastrophe, um, community led means that the community is a decision maker. They have to buy. And so even when funding ends, a nonprofit might get funding to start it. But when their funding runs out, the project ends. Uh, that that's often called a community based initiative. But when they end, the project ends. The community has not bought into it. But if it's community led when it. But that nonprofit again, may play a critical role, but when their funding ends and they have to stop, uh, the whole project ends because the community has not bought into it and take responsibility for it. So both community based and community led are going to be important. But really we have to focus ultimately on the community led initiatives. And again, resilience. Courting networks are therefore urgently needed to out the US and worldwide. We've got to organize and sustain the horizontal social infrastructure in communities needed to build population level transformation, resilience for the climate, adversities that are going to accelerate rapidly. Now, uh, and, and we do that residents can also engage in those changes needed in their communities and in political changes needed as well. So, as I said, with this information in hand, for the past three years, the ITRC has run a community of practice co-sponsored by a whole bunch of other organizations on organizing and operating resilience coordinating networks. And a new one is going to begin in two weeks, February 13th. And we welcome your involvement. You have to apply to attend. There's 100 people, roughly, um, already approved for this year, and they're from all over the world. Uh, if you want to apply, uh, to participate in the ITRC, uh, and, and other organizations community practice, please go to our website. Uh, and you can, uh, find the application form. Then the application requires you to agree to apply what you learn in the community of practice in a neighborhood or community. It's not just an academic exercise to learn more. This is learning and applying what you learned. So just keep that in mind when you apply for that. But we also realize that new policies are needed to fund and support resilience coordinating networks. Because as we talk with all these groups, the ones I listed and a whole bunch of others, uh, these resilience networks, we found that funding was the most important thing. The struggles they had the most, some local groups started lasted a six months or a year or a year and a half, and then without the funding needed, they had to end. They didn't have somebody who could volunteer their time who, uh, to run it. Um, so, uh, and, and also it takes 3 to 5 years for most of these initiatives to mature to the point that they become very effective. Uh, so and they need funding to do that, then they can go out and get a fundraising strategy to get donors, local donors, local foundations, develop a membership, you know, a monthly membership fees, etc.. So we went to the US Congress and got the Community Mental Wellness and Resilience Act introduced in the US House, led by Representative Paul Tonko, who really has done remarkable work on this. And Brian Fitzpatrick are the two original co-sponsors. And there's now 25, I think, actually 26 other co-sponsors, including three Republicans. This is a bipartisan bill. And the companion bill was introduced in the US Senate by Senator Ed Markey and other co-sponsors. And we're working very hard to try to move this bill along, uh, to try to passage this Congress. In fact, uh, late this week or early next week, we're going to release a letter, um, uh, to Congress that is signed by endorsed by 160 organizations that have endorsed the Community Mental Wellness Resilience Act. And this letter is going to say, please pass this bill, this Congress, if your organization would like to endorse the Community Mental Wellness Resilience Act, go to our website and it talks, you'll see on the current events in news page. And you can do you can sign up there. Do that quickly though, because we're going to release this letter to Congress in the next couple of days, likely. Uh, so we want to include your organization if that's of interest, if you live in the US and support the Community Mental Wellness Resilience Act, we also ask you to please contact your local House or Senate member and urge them to co-sponsor the legislation, push for a hearing and enact that this Congress and for information on how to do that, what to say, etc.. Again, you can go to the ITRC website. But just as importantly, similar policies are needed in the US at the territorial, state and local levels, at the community levels and in other nations worldwide. What the community mental Wellness resilience policy at the federal level when it passes is not going to be able to fund all the programs that are needed and exist. We have to the States should develop their own funding strategies. The communities can do it also, and many other nations can develop their own locally adapted, uh, approach to this. Uh, so I want you to think about how you can work with other people, you know, colleagues, local officials, to introduce and enact your own locally tailored legislation. And if you want help with that, if you go to the ITRC website, you'll see quote unquote, model legislation that you can use. You can look at this. It's sort of a generic kind of legislation that you can then adapt for your own particular community, state, province or nation. Uh, and, uh, and, and work on that. So in summary, the climate ecosystem, biodiversity catastrophe is a civilization altering event that will stress or traumatize everyone. And solutions demand transformational changes in many aspects of society. It's going to require transformational changes in our energy systems. Um, our transportation systems are our consumption patterns are waste systems. Many, many, many other systems. And we've been resisting that, uh, for for a long time, in fact, that the I just wrote a, uh, one of my columns for Psychology Today that I've started to write, talks about how we're sort of sleepwalking into this, uh, catastrophe. Um, and, uh, and it's really going to be serious unless we wake up. One of the essential changes that we need to make is to expand how we prevent and heal mental health and psychosocial struggles by embracing a public health approach in communities, organizing these resilience, coordinating networks, whatever you want to call it, you don't have to call it that. Um, but the idea is to develop wide and diverse participation that comes together. It takes time to bring these groups together. You learn how to communicate, uh, you learn how to do some conflict resolution. That's very important because there will always be conflict, especially when groups haven't worked together before. It does require added time. And people often say, well, I have no other time. I can't go to more meetings. Uh, but, uh, this is going to ultimately in the near term, add more time, but ultimately it's going to reduce the time you need, uh, and increase your organization's effectiveness by, uh, integrating your work, partnering with others in the community. So that's really going to be essential. Um, uh, so again, this requires establishing that horizontal social infrastructure that actively engages residents and organizations of all kinds in those multi systemic activities that build and sustain individual and collective mental wellness resilience for ongoing adversities from the bottom up, let me say that I, uh, there's been a focus in some states on resilience hubs. Uh, we think those can be helpful at certain times for certain populations that don't have other resources. Um, but they are just one small part of this much broader, uh, focus that is needed. Uh, and we saw it again here just in Oregon in the middle of the ice storm. Uh, ice. We had two inches of ice on the ground for 4 or 5 days. People couldn't even get to out of their house, let alone get to another facility to get help. Um, and many people won't do that. Won't go somewhere else. Uh, they want to stay in their neighborhood, in their community. So we have to think very carefully about what we mean, about what the value of those is and how to structure a resilience hub. Uh, they are, again, one piece of a much broader, uh, strategy that's needed and that is already being used around the US. Um, but if we do this kind of work, we can build population level transformation, resilience. Again, we didn't make this up. What I just shared with you was the result of talking with and researching and meeting with people all over the world that are on the ground doing this kind of work, so we know it can be done. We just have to expand the way we think about, uh, and respond to ongoing adversities, uh, and expand our approach to mental health, to prioritize a public health approach to mental wellness and resilience. Um, and so I just want to close by saying that I've, uh, again, you've heard me already. I've begun writing a column about this psychology today, learned about this and said, hey, this could be interesting. Why don't you start writing about these? And so I've already written two. You can find those on our website or on Psychology Today's website. Uh, and I'll be doing that on a monthly basis. Um, and, but also we there's two books out on this that you can get more information on. You can get from Barnes and Noble, Routledge. Uh, Amazon. Many other book dealers Preventing and Healing Climate Traumas A Guide to Building Resilience and Hope, and communities and then Transformation. Resilience was back in 2016. Focus just on those core elements of presenting and purposing. So remember in closing that use a. Using a public health approach in communities is really urgent. Now given that the climate ecosystem, biodiversity catastrophe is going to accelerate rather rapidly. But that shows that when we do that communities our medicine, we need to return responsibility for preventing and healing mental health, psychosocial and spiritual problems to communities where it existed for most of human history and has the greatest chance of success. So I want to wish you all the best in all the work you do. I thank you for attending today's presentation. Um, invite you to join our community of practice, or just engage in this kind of work in your community. Um, uh, because we really, uh, time is of the essence to really begin to build these kind of community networks. Uh, as the climate ecosystem, biodiversity emergency, uh, worsens. So with that said, I want to I wish you all the best. And, uh, again, thank you for attending today. By the way, I have you at the bottom, and I think it's in chat. Um, uh, if you have questions or send an email to TR at Tryg. Hyphen Klaus. Or you can send them to the, uh, campaign for Trauma Informed Policy and Practice. Their email should be on chat. Also, we are going to try to respond to questions that are in chat, uh, directly through an email to everybody next week, a list of questions that are related to this information. So welcome. Invite you to do that too. So with that, I wish you all the best. Uh, and we'll see you all down the road. Thank you and good luck on all the hard work you're all doing. Thank you all. Take care.
00:00:07Hi everybody, and welcome to the Community is Medicine Webinar. We're going to start in one minute. So just hang in there for a second if you would. Thank you. Well. Hello, everyone. Uh, my name is Bob dapple. I coordinate the International Transformational Resilience Coalition IITRC for short. Uh, and I want to welcome you all to the webinar on community is medicine. Uh, the urgent need and many benefits of using a public health approach in communities to prevent and heal climate traumas and many other traumas. Um, uh, we are recording this session and it will be available on our the IITRC and the Campaign for Trauma Informed Policy and Practice websites afterwards. We're also going to we're not going to take questions at the end of this session. But if you put your set your questions in chat, and also just very briefly, if you're interested, share who you are, where you're from, etc. in chat. Um, we will respond to questions and send everybody an email. Who's on the webinar? Uh, afterwards, uh, with responses to the questions you raised. So, um, and I want to welcome you no matter what time zone you're in. I know we have some people from Europe. Uh, I think a couple from Africa and many from us and, uh, Canada on the, uh, on the session. So, uh, let me start by just talking a little bit about the ITRC and what, what this webinar is going to be about. We started ten years ago, actually a little over ten years ago now, 2013, um, after Superstorm Sandy hit the east coast of the US and we saw mental health problems skyrocket, uh, in New York and New Jersey and Connecticut. Uh, we were working the ITRC was working down in there. My organization was working down in Southeast Florida. We saw the same impacts down there. And that led us to realize, because I have a grounding in climate science as well as in mental health, that the climate emergency was going to get a lot worse. Uh, and so we needed to get out in front of these issues. That's how the ITRC was formed. Um, we've been running webinars and training workshops on how to build resilience, uh, for adverse conditions. And, uh, about four years ago, uh, a number of our members came to us and said, we have to come up with a different approach to address these issues because we're seeing, uh, extreme weather events, disasters, emergencies and stresses all over the world. We can't keep up with the current given the current approach, which is predominantly treating individuals after they experienced trauma. We can't keep up with that. We need a new approach. So that launch day, what we thought was going to be a six month, uh, research project, we had a bunch of graduate students involved, turned out to be a two and a half year research project. The project that was fascinating. We talked with folks all over the world, and it turns out that there is an approach that we know can help prevent and heal the mental health and psychosocial problems generated by ongoing adversities, which is what the climate emergency generates, and that is a public health approach to mental wellness and resilience. At least that's what we call it in Western countries. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Once we realized that, we started running a community of practice, uh, on on training people and how to use a public health approach, uh, to mental wellness and resilience. And we've done that for three years, and our fourth one is starting in two weeks. And I'll talk about that in a second. We also realized that many of these community based initiatives that already exist, that are doing this kind of work, not necessarily focused on the climate emergency, they struggle for funding to get off the ground, to keep the and to continue to mature to the point that they're really effective. So we went to the US Congress, uh, and got the Community Mental Wellness Resilience Act introduced. Uh, and I'm going to talk a little bit about that that will fund, help fund and support these community based initiatives. And I just started writing a Psychology Today column or regular column about these issues. And also there's published a book last year about it called Preventing and Healing Climate Trauma as a Guide to Building Resilience and Hope in communities. I'm going to talk about that at the end also. So you have more resources. So let's talk about the distressing news first. And then we're going to get into the constructive and positive news. Um, we know that there's all sorts of traumas and toxic stresses affecting people today. Uh, and uh, from job and economic struggles to poverty to racism, uh, to political, uh, extremism and violence and other sorts of things, but to these many other traumatic stressors, we have to add the climate ecosystem and biodiversity catastrophe that is already and will increasingly affect every aspect of society. Now I'm using the term catastrophe not to sensationalize the issue, but in terms used in disaster sociology. In disaster sociology, an emergency is a short term event caused by a single factor that has limited geographic and social consequences. Disasters. In contrast, have a longer time frame, and much larger impacts. Uh, often involve multiple causes, uh, but they are characterized as single events that eventually end and give people time to recover. A catastrophe, however, is an event that has multiple interacting impacts that are very substantial and widespread, that build on themselves and are often cumulative and have many unforeseen, surprising consequences. Consequently, they're much more severe and complicated and prolonged than an emergency and disasters. And what that means is, most importantly, you don't respond to or manage a catastrophe in the same way you do an emergency or a disaster because they are more complicated, severe, widespread, cumulative and prolonged. That's what's happening with the climate emergency. It's not just an atmospheric problems. The atmospheric changes in global temperatures and the energy balance and the climate system is impacting ecological systems and biodiversity, which is also feeding back to the impact, the climate system. So, uh, and it is a catastrophe. It is a prolonged, widespread, severe and cumulative uh, uh, experience we're having. Um, and mostly what we've been doing so far, at best, is preparing to respond to, uh, events, serious disasters and events that end and give people time to recover. But global warming is, uh, a global climate ecosystem. Biodiversity catastrophe is clearly a catastrophe, and it requires a very different type of response. Uh, if we don't do this, the left unaddressed, this catastrophe is going to create an epidemic of traumas all over the world. And to address it, we must proactively build what we call population transformational resilience, not just treat individuals after they're traumatized or react to the next disaster. Our hope that strengthening and enhancing external physical resilience is sufficient for what we face. Well, just very briefly, what are some of those impacts that we're going to see? The most pervasive impacts, the ones that are most widespread and severe are cascading disruptions to the ecological, social and economic systems people rely on for basic needs that in different times and ways and magnitudes, will emotionally distress all of us. And that's food, water and resource shortages or disruptions, job and income losses, new illnesses and diseases, loss of place, community culture, loss of the natural environment, disruptions of close family and friends, social networks, involuntary migration, being forced to move because of drought or floods or wildfires. And then in migration, people coming in that other people don't want to have in their community. Heat disaster triggered crime, aggression and violence. Worrying about our our future and our children futures and many other sort of surprising, never ending stress pileups and those stress pileups caused by those those cascading disruptions to the core systems we all rely on for basic needs are sometimes activated by, and other times accelerated by, more frequent, extreme and prolonged disasters that traumatize millions of people. 20 to 40% of people who are directly impacted can be traumatized, including ten to, uh, in addition to 10 to 20% of the emergency responders or people who know someone who's impacted or even view the events from afar, um, uh, and many other unforeseen ones. And so ultimately, everyone is going to be impacted by the climate ecosystem, biodiversity catastrophe. This is a population level problem. We have to understand that. But in the near term, in different times, ways and magnitude, there are some populations and some individuals that are at greater risk Bipoc residents, low income residents, migrants, ethnic minorities, single women, young children, people living alone, the elderly, people in insecure housing, those living in high risk zones, people with preexisting conditions, first responders and which it means that climate impacts are aggravating existing inequalities and injustices, and adding many new ones that even greater and greater impacts on many of these groups. But beware, be careful as to how you approach this, because only focusing on the quote unquote vulnerable groups and populations can allow wealthier people to think, well, it's not going to affect me, and I've got enough resources, etc., to be immune from what's happening. So I don't need to cut my emissions. I don't need to do anything about the climate emergency. This is just about vulnerable populations, which is obviously not true. And so left unaddressed what we're already seeing around the world. Uh uh. And will increasingly see as a global epidemic of individual, community and societal distresses and traumas. What do I mean by that? Psychological, emotional, and spiritual distresses can be considered an understandable and normal response associated with stressors and demands that are difficult to cope with, or the result from witnessing others and harmful situations, or fantasizing about future impacts. This is what climate anxiety is about, and I just wrote a column for Psychology Today about that. Given an ice storm, uh, we just experienced here where I live. Individual trauma is a little different. It's can be defined as a blow to the psyche that breaks through one's defenses with such brutal force that one cannot react to it effectively. And as so often happens in catastrophes, people withdraw into themselves. They feel numb, afraid, vulnerable, and very alone. This is a great definition of trauma by Kyle Erickson. We in the mental health and social service world, which I think most of the people who registered for the webinar are from not all, but most, um, we understand distresses and traumas, but we don't understand community and societal trauma quite as well. Uh, and they are just as important. So what is it, a community trauma? Uh, it's an event or series. An event that is a basic blow to the social tissue of social life, that it damages the bonds that attach people together and leaves them with an impaired sense of community. It's a gradual realization that the community no longer exists as an effective sort of source of support, and important part of the self has disappeared. Societal trauma goes beyond a specific geographic area, or a group with a shared identity to affect entire cultures, nations, or all of humanity. The Covid 19 pandemic is a classic societal trauma. When a community burns down in a historic wildfire that, like happened in Lahaina, Hawaii, a number of months ago, that's a that can create the community wide trauma. Uh, and we're seeing more of these around the world. And if we leave these issues unaddressed, the climate ecosystem, biodiversity catastrophe will be the greatest societal trauma modern society has ever experienced. And I want to also emphasize that there is no physical health without mental health. So we have these, uh, individual, uh, community and societal traumas, these mental health issues, but they also affect our physical health. This is a quote from Doctor Brooke Brock Chisholm, who was the first director of the World Health Organization. That is, comorbidity, as it's called, is very common adverse social, psychological, emotional, behavioral conditions often aggravate existing or directly produce new physical health problems. Heart disease, diabetes, cancers, and other sorts of health problems and physical health problems can come back to create mental health issues. Uh, so again, if we leave these issues unaddressed, widespread stresses and traumas are going to greatly accelerate physical health problems as well as the cost associated with them. And pervasive traumas tend to feed on themselves and become epidemic. Epidemic. And that's because what unaddressed trauma becomes buried in our nervous system that causes us to to remain in a constant fight or flight. Protective reaction that leads people to deny what's happening, dissociate, disconnect themselves from the world and what's happening. Blame others, attack others, self-sabotage, reenact the same patterns over and over, trying to work it out in their own mind. And it's seen time and again throughout history. These reactions can unravel families, groups, communities, and entire societies. And we are seeing that in many places already, including here in the US. And finally, these flight or flight protective reactions resulting from continued the continued activation of the emotional brain, the fear and alarm center of our brain, the limbic system that also is blocking climate solutions. Because when people are in this protective fight or flight mode, anything that seems like a threat, including rising prices, a shift from fossil fuels to clean energy, whatever they oppose that it's too much stress. It's too much trouble. Uh, and so it's it it really, uh, really is is a serious problem. In fact, what we see in many places is it's not so much ideology, political ideology that that causes many people to oppose new climate policies as much as that if things have gone wrong in people's lives and they they oppose a change in that sense. And this is happening just at the time. When solutions to the climate ecosystem biodiversity require catastrophe, require constant learning, growth, adaptation and innovation. So just when we need this kind of innovation, we're actually frozen in place because people are in this fight or flight protective mode. So I just want to emphasize and I'll talk about this again in a second. There is no community resilience without human, social, psychological and emotional resilience. It is essential that we slash greenhouse gas emissions and strengthen external physical resilience and restore ecosystems. But they are likely, and we've seen it already to have limited effect. Uh, and less an equal or greater emphasis is placed on strengthening the human, social, psychological and emotional dimensions of resilience. Those two things have to be coupled and integrated together. Yet in the US and many other, especially wealthier nations, higher income nations, mental health issues have been privatized. What do I mean by that? The dominant paradigm is at the individual alone is responsible for the psychological, emotional, behavioral struggles. And the correct approach, consequently, is to treat individuals mostly one at a time, only after they experience symptoms of troubles. But if this makes sense, how is it possible that mental health and psychosocial struggles have continually grown over the last decade or more to points where they're now epidemic? I think everybody would acknowledge that we're facing an epidemic of these problems. How is that possible? All the individuals somehow had something going wrong with them. Uh, and the existing individualized paradigm and our systems that support it restrict the discourse to only what fits within it. So it's been difficult to talk about a much more broader and different approach. But the reality is climate traumas and many other of the mental health psychosocial problems, behavioral health problems we see today, we could call traumas result from interacting individual, family, social, economic and ecological factors. This is called the social ecological model. You can get it on the web, lots of information about it that the individual is clearly affected by their genetics, uh, clearly, and their attitudes, their childhood experiences. But that's influenced by their connections with families, friends and social networks, which is all influenced by their community in which they live, the conditions of their neighborhood, the workplaces, schools, voluntary and civic groups, spiritual groups all of that is shaped and influenced by structural factors, policies, institutions, power relationships, the kind of services that are available, and all of that is shaped by the environment in which that surrounds people. The conditions of food and water, open space, green space, the physical built system, economic and ecological systems. Uh, and research shows that these systems, many of these systems or aspects of are now dysfunctional today and interact in multi systemic ways. All these multi systemic factors are interacting to create widespread emotional distresses and traumas in the US and worldwide. Uh, and so to address these multi systemic factors, we've got to get out of our silos, our professional silos, our work silos, etc., and begin to think systemically and respond holistically. But if we take this path, we have seen that the climate ecosystem, biodiversity catastrophe can activate deep seated transformational changes. And that's what I want to focus on now. We must proactively build what we call population level capacity for transformational resilience. What does this mean when suffering is caused by previously unseen external forces that have no endpoint, no resolution or simple cure, and that is the climate ecosystem biodiversity catastrophe? The priority must be to help everyone develop the capacity to buffer themselves from and push back against those stressors, and at the same time find constructive new sources of meaning, purpose, courage, and hope in life. Because the way we found meaning and purpose and hope are not necessarily going to be the same way as we can do that, we can same we can find in the future. So what do we mean by transformation? Resilience. We need to help everyone strengthen their capacity for presence ING or self-regulation, which is to calm their body, mind, and emotions and behaviors in the midst of adversities. Um, it's our sympathetic nervous system that's activated. We're in that we're in those fight or flight reactions, those defensive reactions. And so presence activates the parasympathetic nervous system to calm, uh, our, our sympathetic nervous system just to calm ourselves. Um, and, uh, and when we get that in control enough also Purposing. So presence and Purposing Purposing is adversity based growth that is using adversities to keep learning and adapting to find new sources of meaning, purpose, hope and courage in life and what we've seen and I think most of you who are attending, well, if you think about it, look back on your life and find that there's probably some of the times when you did this to the combination of calming yourself, calming your emotions and your body and your behaviors and finding new meaning, purpose and hope and life can really, uh, combine to rebuild faith in the future. And that's what's really needed. And the capacity for transformation. Resilience is also shaped by those interacting individual, family, social, economic, physical, built and ecological conditions. We have to address them all, which means we have to respond at the scale of the challenges we now face, which we know are very large. And this means we must work at and think and work at the population level by actively engaging neighborhoods and communities. And this was reaffirmed by a comment from the noted pioneer clinical psychologist, Doctor George Albee, a number of years back, who said no epidemic has ever been resolved by paying attention to the treatment of the affected individual. Now, this is a psychologist. He's talking about mental health issues. He's not a physical health person who's talking about a disease of some kind. He's saying even with this kind of an epidemic with mental health issues, we we can't just pay attention to the individual. And when we were doing our research on these issues. This key point led us to determine that, uh, we must address the population level, multi systemic factors. Uh, by expanding our approach to mental health and mental wellness that exist today in the US and in many other wealthier nations, to prioritize a public health approach to mental wellness and transformational resilience. So what is the public health approach to mental wellness and resilience? A public health approach to mental wellness or resilience takes a population level approach, as we've been talking about, not one that merely focuses on individuals with symptoms of pathology or high risk groups, though they must absolutely be fully included by using what's called proportionate universalism and life course approaches. You can look those up. I don't have time to talk about those there, but our mantra really has to be leave no one behind. A public health approach to mental wellness. Resilience prioritizes preventing problems before they emerge, not merely reacting to or trying to treat them after they appear, and it integrates group and community minded healing methods into the prevention strategies their combined. So we must always remember that prevention is the cure. And a public health approach to mental wellness and transformation. Resilience achieves these goals by strengthening protective factors, social support networks, resilience, skills, habits, local resources, etc. that build and sustain healthy thinking and behaviors even in the midst of adversities. Not just trying to fix deficits or treating individuals as symptoms of pathology. So again, we must build strength, social connections and resources, not just treat individuals with symptoms of pathology. Research shows that mental health, mental wellness and transformation resilience can be enhanced and that the most effective way to do that is to establish the horizontal social infrastructure in communities that we call a resilience coordinating network. There's all sorts of variations of this name. Sometimes it's resilience task force, sometimes it's a steering committee, sometimes it's a board, but it's a coordinating network. And I'll explain why we use that term. But it engages a broad and diverse array of local, grassroots and neighborhood leaders, voluntary leaders, civic leaders, the YMCA, schools, business groups, etc., as well as private, nonprofit and public human services, social services, and all types of other organizations in jointly planning and implementing multi systemic strategies of what we mean, strategies that address all of those different kinds of factors that are creating the traumas and stresses in communities. Um, so those strategies that strengthen as many drivers of individual and collective mental wellness and resilience as possible in the community, each community is going to be different. They're addressing different issues. So here's a sample ideal resilience coordinating network. It's actually made up of one that we we work with and know about. Um, but you could call this well coordinated decentralization using a ring team or a hub and spoke approach. So in the center circle, you see, um, around the center circle there's neighborhood leaders are involved. They come together with private sector civic leaders. I'm going down to the right hand side. Youth leaders, public sector leaders, mental health and human services leaders, nonprofit faith leaders, uh, a whole diverse array of folks. And each one's going to be different. And they might elect co-chair and executive committee to make ongoing daily decisions. And if they're lucky, they actually have paid staff who can coordinate all this. Uh, they come together and develop this this, uh, the strategies. How do we work with neighborhood leaders, how do we work with youth, etc.? And so outside of this of the formal steering committee, there are what we call different resilience innovation teams working with different populations or sectors. So up in the upper right hand corner, there might be one that's working with neighborhood groups and then going down to the right, another one with working with the private sector or with youth groups or with the educational system, uh, or with the public organizations or with human services programs and climate adaptation works and community leader innovation teams, etc. they're all developing their own strategies, um, working with the populations or in the sectors they work in. But they come back and they share what their strategies are and what they're doing with the broader steering committee, and they get feedback on their strategies, they say. So an education group might say, well, we've got these. We really developed ways to engage the educational system in our community in building mental wellness resilience. But somebody might raise a hand then and say, well, you know, about 15%, 10% of our community, the kids in our community are getting private, schooled, homeschooled. Have you thought about how to engage them? Oh, no, we haven't. Okay. So let's figure out a way to do that. Um, that's the advantage that but they also share fundraising strategies, sometimes coordinate them, sometimes separated them enough to be able to distinguish them. So they both need to dip money different groups and get, uh, funding. So again, it's well coordinated decentralization. And there's a whole bunch of organizations, communities using this approach in different variations of it around the US and internationally. So why do we need this ongoing kind of resilience coordinating networks? Here's the six common phases of disasters. Uh, that will help us think about as there's the on the left side, you can see there's the pre disaster stage is often warnings. Uh, it might be a uh a earthquake. And we, you know, you get a day or two or longer warming with the climate emergency. We've had decades and decades of warning. Then the impacts happen. And as we said before, they can directly traumatize 20 to 40% of the people who are directly impacted and 10 to 20% of others. Then you go through the heroic phase where people step forward and help out others they don't even know, never met. They put their lives on the line often to help others, and then after the impacts sort of fade, it's sort of at the end of the impact phase, and often for a month or two, sometimes longer. It goes into the community cohesion or what's often called the honeymoon phase of disaster that can last just a few days or weeks or months. People come together who don't know each other. They help each other. They provide food, shelter, um, clothing, uh, heat, whatever it might be. Uh, and people who often don't even like each other work together, uh, in this phase. But then eventually people have to go back and run and deal with their own lives. Uh, and that community cohesion phase ends, and they enter what's called the disillusionment phase. And this can last for months or years. Uh, and this is when most of the mental health and psychosocial, uh, behavioral problems emerge. Uh, because people are now on their own. Uh, and as you can see, it just goes down. Some people remain dysregulated forever. After months or years, people, most will then begin to recover, assuming there's not another disaster or severe stress that they experienced. So the recovery phase starts. But again, another, uh, stress or disaster can a cause regression or prevent recovery? Um, and why do we need this resilience coordinate networks? Because the climate ecosystem, biodiversity catastrophe is going to continue and accelerate for decades. Most mental health and psychosocial problems emerge months or long after the extreme stresses or direct impacts of disasters occur. So we need to build the horizontal infrastructure in our neighborhoods and communities needed to sustain that community cohesion phase for decades to come. That's what a resilience coordinating network ultimately does. It really, uh, extends that rather than allowing it to be to dissipate over time? But we completed extensive research into what are the five core protective factors, if you will, that are really going to be needed to build population level, capacity for transformation, resilience for the climate ecosystem, biodiversity catastrophe. And I want to briefly share those with you. By far the most important is to build, quote unquote, strong and weak social connections across cultural, economic, racial and geographic boundaries in the community. By strong and weak, we mean strong, our close friend, connections with family and friends. We are sort of, you know, you get, you know, other people and you have some relationships with them, but you don't share your personal issues with them, etc. they're weaker, but they're both very important. It's often called bonding, bridging or linking social support networks and building these social connections is vital to address the toxic social isolation and loneliness that is generating profound mental health problems today. And family, friends and neighbors are usually far more important than first responders during the first 3 to 5 days, and often much longer of many disasters. Social connections are especially important in times of crisis because they provide the emotional safety and practical support needed for health and resilience. And just as importantly, in doing this, some people find meaning and purpose in their lives that they hadn't had before by assisting others in their community or in their neighborhood. Uh, we just experienced this. Exactly. And where I live in Oregon, when we got hit the two weeks ago by and it's record, uh, ice storm, uh, uh, people couldn't get out, couldn't go anywhere, first responders couldn't get out very much. Uh, and it was families, friends, families and neighbors who were taking care of each other, providing food, providing shelter, making sure people had heat, etc.. Uh, and this is, this is just really important to do. Uh, and there's exciting programs going on around internationally and into the US on different ways to build these social connections. Just as importantly, um, is to build, to ensure a just transition by engaging residents and creating zero emission, climate resilient, physical, built economic and ecological conditions. There are programs underway. Many of you under who are watching the webinar might be involved in, uh, a greenhouse gas reduction program or, uh, community resilience building, uh, external physical resilience building program. Uh, but they tend to be siloed from everything else. They're just doing your thing. There's mental health, mental wellness and other things to doing other things. But it's really vital to to bring these all together. So, uh, really trying to create locally owned and operated businesses that provide family wage jobs, healthy and safe public spaces, equitable transportation systems, restoring local forests and ecological systems, ample and safe housing, etc.. Uh, this is critical, and it's vital to engage people, residents directly in this. Not just have a nonprofit or a government agency or a private organization do the work and just get some feedback from residents that don't buy into it. And it's important because unhealthy local conditions create mental health and psychosocial problems. Unhealthy housing and transportation, lack of parks and open space, etc. polluted areas create mental health and psychosocial problems. But we know research shows and experience shows that active engagement by residents in creating healthier ingest conditions from the bottom up, meaning they're actively engaged, builds hope in people, which enhances resilience and add adaptability. While also integrating this external physical resilience and emission reductions with human, psychological, social and emotional resilience, and all the while reducing local emissions, strengthening external physical adaptation, and often creating social and political pressure for change. So I want to reiterate there is no community resilience without human, social, psychological and emotional resilience. Efforts to slash fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emission, restore ecosystems and build external physical resilience needs to be fully integrated into efforts to build population level mental wellness and transformation resilience. We can't continue this this siloed way in which we're operating. And the same thing is true for disaster preparedness and response, disaster, mental health and many other human services that will remain very important but will become much more effective when they're integrated into community led, resilience building initiatives. The third foundational area we identified in these. These are all interactive. I'll talk about that in a second, is to build, uh, foster universal literacy about mental wellness and transformation, resilience by helping everyone become trauma and resilience informed. And what this means is, uh, help everyone understand what happens in their body, minds and emotions and behaviors when they experience significant stress or an acute trauma, uh, that it causes those fight or flight or often freeze reactions when it's overwhelming. That puts us in this self defensive protective mode that creates emotional distresses, behaviors that are not very helpful, etc. and then to learn those presences and purchasing resilience skill that I talk about when, uh, when you teach everyone these skills, young kids, uh, adolescents and older folks, working age people, just basic understanding of this. It helps people understand what's happening within them and around them. Uh, which can normalize their struggles. Oh, there's nothing wrong with me. This is natural. It's built into my system, uh, reduces the fear of being stigmatized. If they talk about the mental health or psychosocial struggle, they're happening. Uh, and it also helps them eliminate being stigmatizing other people. While it builds the knowledge and skills needed to prevent and heal their own struggles, mental health and spiritual struggles, and motivating some people to find meaning and purpose in life by helping others become trauma and resilience informed. Uh, it's very powerful. Uh oh, I get it. Now I understand what's happening with me. I'm going to share this with others and help others understand it so they don't feel bad about themselves and feel like, uh, there's something fundamentally wrong with them. Uh, the fourth area we found that's going to be very important to for communities and neighbors to is to engage residents regularly, engage them in specific practices that enhance mental wellness and transformation. Resilience. Helping people laugh, often even in the midst of adversity. Find something to laugh about. Uh, just laughing about the human condition can often do it, uh, and finding simple joys. The birds that are flying through the, you know, above you. Or a flower that's growing. Just something simple. Taking care of the body, eating well, getting good exercise or physical exercise. Being grateful for what you have, uh, continual learning and practicing forgiveness. This is going to be really important as the climate emergency, uh, continues. Because, again, those fight, flight or freeze reactions that stress and trauma can create will cause people to do things that they that don't come out too well. And you want to practice forgiveness for them, but that's mostly for you. So you don't get all stressed out. And you also want to practice forgiveness for yourself because you're going to be doing things that looking back on it, you might say, why did world did I do that? So you have to practice forgiveness. But active engagement in these activities releases trauma from the nervous system, which helps prevent and heal them. While engaging in these activities with others can build social connections through pro-social activities. And often offering experiences that create emotional states that provide meaning to people. Uh, so practicing forgiveness can really provide people with a real, true sense of meaning in life, and it often motivates some people to find meaning and purpose in their life new meaning and purpose by helping others do this. So teaching others how to practice forgiveness or how to be grateful, that'd be grateful, or how to find simple joys. It can be a very powerful experience for people. And finally, the last area we've identified. And it took a lot of research to go through all this and look at the community programs going on around the world. Um, the fifth one is to establish ongoing, mostly peer led group and community minded opportunities to heal traumas. So up in the top, you see healing circles and other group methods where people come together with 5 to 100 other people, uh, facilitated by a peer, uh, trained peer who and they share what they're going through and they hear from others. Oh, they're going through something similar that that I'm going through. Oh, there's nothing wrong with me. A lot of people are dealing with this and oh, here's how these other people are dealing with it. Maybe I can try that too. And it builds social connections, builds those, but also build skills, helps people begin to release the trauma and heal. But their somatic methods or expressive therapies art, drama, music, dance, writing and more. Mindfulness based healing, spiritual healing, nature and animal theory, uh, and and memorial events are going to be very important in your community. Uh, the date of a major disaster or when something happened to memorialize that. And so people don't forget. And then you'll see down at the lower right hand corner, mental health treatments will remain important. Um, but they cannot be the dominant focus because there simply aren't enough mental health professionals, uh, available to help all the people that are traumatized. And many people over 50% won't engage in mental health treatment anyway because of fears of being stigmatized or the cost, uh, or just the location of where there's, uh, most of most of the providers are in urban or suburban areas, not, uh, rural areas, etc., etc. lots of reasons. Uh, so it'll remain important, but it can't be the dominant focus. But group, uh, communities can engage in these others all the time. And these healing methods normalize struggles and help eliminate fears of being stigmatized. When you're with a group of other people doing that, you don't feel it's not just me alone. Um, uh. While it allows people to hear how others view their struggles and approach their healing in a non-judgmental setting, and it builds the emotional safety net that helps people release their trauma, begin to heal, and remain resilient and adaptable. And that's really, again, adaptation. The ability to adapt to changing conditions is a core part of transformational resilience, uh, because we're going to have to keep doing that as the climate ecosystem biodiversity emergency gets worse, all while helping people find new meaning and purpose in their lives. Many times by being trained as a peer facilitator. I went through this process. Boy, was it helpful for me. I'm going to go get trained in how to help others do the same thing and run a group like this facilitated group. Well, again, these five foundational areas are interactive. Uh, you can start with anyone you want in different communities. Do start with different ones. Some start with just helping everyone become trauma informed and then they work on other other folks. So you start with whatever makes sense to the needs of your particular neighborhood or community, and then you can add others over time as you as you learn how to, to do that. But application to these five foundational focuses requires place based, community led initiatives, uh, that are focused on building widespread relationships horizontally in the community, not from the top down. To enhance voluntary interdependency, there's nobody forcing people to come together and plan and implement strategies and evaluate strategies and continually improvement. It's voluntary, uh, but focused on, uh, but all those strategies and that voluntary interdependence helps all residents feel listened to and cared for, and consequently, they're willing to take ownership in what's happening. It's not the nonprofit or the government agency that has ownership for this. It's the community members that have ownership. Here's a few examples of resilience coordinated networks in the US. Uh, North Carolina. Uh, Smart Start Healthy and Resilient Community Initiative now have 40 plus. And they're focused on four Aces, as they call adverse childhood experiences, adverse community experiences, adverse climate experiences, and atrocious cultural experience, they said. Virginia's trauma informed Community Networks has 32, uh, networks around the state that are building resilience in and preventing and mitigating the impacts of trauma in their communities. Peace for Tarpon and Tarpon Springs, Florida, was the first trauma informed community in the US. By Terry by Robin Sanger does great work. There's a community resilience initiative in Walla Walla, Washington. It's also one of the leaders in this. The San Francisco Neighbor Empowerment Network is now on hold. Has done some really fabulous work. Uh, Rhode Island Health Equity Zones is another example. There's over 200 associated with the Mark program mobilizing action for resilient communities. They're mostly focused on adverse childhood experiences, but they're in a report by the Health Federation of Philadelphia. You can get them on there online. And there's many others in the US. And then there's many international, uh, initiatives. Uh, and they're mostly called mental health and psychosocial support groups. So here's the definition of community based mental health. Psychosocial support approach puts individuals, communities and social systems at the center of the intervention in all phases of the response. Uh, this is by the interagency Standing Committee, community based approaches to mental health and psychosocial support programs. And you can go to their website, uh, the Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Network, for more information. And I work with a number of those groups now, and talking more and more about how we get these programs to focus on the climate emergency. So but only a few of the initiatives I just described just actually describe their work as a public health approach, but they're using it. Each is unique. There is no one size fits all approach. None address all of the five core foundational areas that I just mentioned. They focus on 1 or 2, and then they they move on and try to expand. And only a few are yet to be explicitly focused on the climate emergency. But they show how community is medicine, and that's really important. Community is medicine. Uh, and so if those that are not focused on the climate catastrophe begin to expand to address it, and we organize thousands of new of these community initiatives in the US, Canada, Europe and other places around the world, we can build universal capacity for transformation or resilience. And just want to emphasize that community led initiatives are key. Although well intentioned and helpful for some people, mental health services by trained professionals that treat individuals after symptoms appear. Which is what we dominantly do now. Programs focus on specific populations and isolation of others, which is also what we do, and projects run by NGOs or public agencies that get a grant and run a project for X amount of years. But they retained the decision making authority over what's happening in those, uh, can again, be very well intentioned and be positive, but they cannot build or sustain the population level capacity for transformation, resilience that's going to be needed for the decades long climate ecosystem, biodiversity, catastrophe, um, community led means that the community is a decision maker. They have to buy. And so even when funding ends, a nonprofit might get funding to start it. But when their funding runs out, the project ends. Uh, that that's often called a community based initiative. But when they end, the project ends. The community has not bought into it. But if it's community led when it. But that nonprofit again, may play a critical role, but when their funding ends and they have to stop, uh, the whole project ends because the community has not bought into it and take responsibility for it. So both community based and community led are going to be important. But really we have to focus ultimately on the community led initiatives. And again, resilience. Courting networks are therefore urgently needed to out the US and worldwide. We've got to organize and sustain the horizontal social infrastructure in communities needed to build population level transformation, resilience for the climate, adversities that are going to accelerate rapidly. Now, uh, and, and we do that residents can also engage in those changes needed in their communities and in political changes needed as well. So, as I said, with this information in hand, for the past three years, the ITRC has run a community of practice co-sponsored by a whole bunch of other organizations on organizing and operating resilience coordinating networks. And a new one is going to begin in two weeks, February 13th. And we welcome your involvement. You have to apply to attend. There's 100 people, roughly, um, already approved for this year, and they're from all over the world. Uh, if you want to apply, uh, to participate in the ITRC, uh, and, and other organizations community practice, please go to our website. Uh, and you can, uh, find the application form. Then the application requires you to agree to apply what you learn in the community of practice in a neighborhood or community. It's not just an academic exercise to learn more. This is learning and applying what you learned. So just keep that in mind when you apply for that. But we also realize that new policies are needed to fund and support resilience coordinating networks. Because as we talk with all these groups, the ones I listed and a whole bunch of others, uh, these resilience networks, we found that funding was the most important thing. The struggles they had the most, some local groups started lasted a six months or a year or a year and a half, and then without the funding needed, they had to end. They didn't have somebody who could volunteer their time who, uh, to run it. Um, so, uh, and, and also it takes 3 to 5 years for most of these initiatives to mature to the point that they become very effective. Uh, so and they need funding to do that, then they can go out and get a fundraising strategy to get donors, local donors, local foundations, develop a membership, you know, a monthly membership fees, etc.. So we went to the US Congress and got the Community Mental Wellness and Resilience Act introduced in the US House, led by Representative Paul Tonko, who really has done remarkable work on this. And Brian Fitzpatrick are the two original co-sponsors. And there's now 25, I think, actually 26 other co-sponsors, including three Republicans. This is a bipartisan bill. And the companion bill was introduced in the US Senate by Senator Ed Markey and other co-sponsors. And we're working very hard to try to move this bill along, uh, to try to passage this Congress. In fact, uh, late this week or early next week, we're going to release a letter, um, uh, to Congress that is signed by endorsed by 160 organizations that have endorsed the Community Mental Wellness Resilience Act. And this letter is going to say, please pass this bill, this Congress, if your organization would like to endorse the Community Mental Wellness Resilience Act, go to our website and it talks, you'll see on the current events in news page. And you can do you can sign up there. Do that quickly though, because we're going to release this letter to Congress in the next couple of days, likely. Uh, so we want to include your organization if that's of interest, if you live in the US and support the Community Mental Wellness Resilience Act, we also ask you to please contact your local House or Senate member and urge them to co-sponsor the legislation, push for a hearing and enact that this Congress and for information on how to do that, what to say, etc.. Again, you can go to the ITRC website. But just as importantly, similar policies are needed in the US at the territorial, state and local levels, at the community levels and in other nations worldwide. What the community mental Wellness resilience policy at the federal level when it passes is not going to be able to fund all the programs that are needed and exist. We have to the States should develop their own funding strategies. The communities can do it also, and many other nations can develop their own locally adapted, uh, approach to this. Uh, so I want you to think about how you can work with other people, you know, colleagues, local officials, to introduce and enact your own locally tailored legislation. And if you want help with that, if you go to the ITRC website, you'll see quote unquote, model legislation that you can use. You can look at this. It's sort of a generic kind of legislation that you can then adapt for your own particular community, state, province or nation. Uh, and, uh, and, and work on that. So in summary, the climate ecosystem, biodiversity catastrophe is a civilization altering event that will stress or traumatize everyone. And solutions demand transformational changes in many aspects of society. It's going to require transformational changes in our energy systems. Um, our transportation systems are our consumption patterns are waste systems. Many, many, many other systems. And we've been resisting that, uh, for for a long time, in fact, that the I just wrote a, uh, one of my columns for Psychology Today that I've started to write, talks about how we're sort of sleepwalking into this, uh, catastrophe. Um, and, uh, and it's really going to be serious unless we wake up. One of the essential changes that we need to make is to expand how we prevent and heal mental health and psychosocial struggles by embracing a public health approach in communities, organizing these resilience, coordinating networks, whatever you want to call it, you don't have to call it that. Um, but the idea is to develop wide and diverse participation that comes together. It takes time to bring these groups together. You learn how to communicate, uh, you learn how to do some conflict resolution. That's very important because there will always be conflict, especially when groups haven't worked together before. It does require added time. And people often say, well, I have no other time. I can't go to more meetings. Uh, but, uh, this is going to ultimately in the near term, add more time, but ultimately it's going to reduce the time you need, uh, and increase your organization's effectiveness by, uh, integrating your work, partnering with others in the community. So that's really going to be essential. Um, uh, so again, this requires establishing that horizontal social infrastructure that actively engages residents and organizations of all kinds in those multi systemic activities that build and sustain individual and collective mental wellness resilience for ongoing adversities from the bottom up, let me say that I, uh, there's been a focus in some states on resilience hubs. Uh, we think those can be helpful at certain times for certain populations that don't have other resources. Um, but they are just one small part of this much broader, uh, focus that is needed. Uh, and we saw it again here just in Oregon in the middle of the ice storm. Uh, ice. We had two inches of ice on the ground for 4 or 5 days. People couldn't even get to out of their house, let alone get to another facility to get help. Um, and many people won't do that. Won't go somewhere else. Uh, they want to stay in their neighborhood, in their community. So we have to think very carefully about what we mean, about what the value of those is and how to structure a resilience hub. Uh, they are, again, one piece of a much broader, uh, strategy that's needed and that is already being used around the US. Um, but if we do this kind of work, we can build population level transformation, resilience. Again, we didn't make this up. What I just shared with you was the result of talking with and researching and meeting with people all over the world that are on the ground doing this kind of work, so we know it can be done. We just have to expand the way we think about, uh, and respond to ongoing adversities, uh, and expand our approach to mental health, to prioritize a public health approach to mental wellness and resilience. Um, and so I just want to close by saying that I've, uh, again, you've heard me already. I've begun writing a column about this psychology today, learned about this and said, hey, this could be interesting. Why don't you start writing about these? And so I've already written two. You can find those on our website or on Psychology Today's website. Uh, and I'll be doing that on a monthly basis. Um, and, but also we there's two books out on this that you can get more information on. You can get from Barnes and Noble, Routledge. Uh, Amazon. Many other book dealers Preventing and Healing Climate Traumas A Guide to Building Resilience and Hope, and communities and then Transformation. Resilience was back in 2016. Focus just on those core elements of presenting and purposing. So remember in closing that use a. Using a public health approach in communities is really urgent. Now given that the climate ecosystem, biodiversity catastrophe is going to accelerate rather rapidly. But that shows that when we do that communities our medicine, we need to return responsibility for preventing and healing mental health, psychosocial and spiritual problems to communities where it existed for most of human history and has the greatest chance of success. So I want to wish you all the best in all the work you do. I thank you for attending today's presentation.