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Mutual Support for All: The Need to Form Community-led Wellness & Resilience Networks for the Climate Crisis

Bob Doppelt, PhD 🇺🇸
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Information

Note:

This is no longer a live event but will be available on demand at a later date.

Description

This webinar will focus on the importance of organizing multi-sectoral networks in communities that use a public health approach to provide Mutual Support For All to prevent and heal the human and ecological impacts of the climate-ecosystem-biodiversity (C-E-B) crisis. The rapidly accelerating C-E-B crisis will increasingly generate more frequent, extreme, surprising, and prolonged disasters that severely stress or traumatize millions of people worldwide. The disasters will be coupled with cascading breakdowns in the ecological, social, economic, and political systems people rely on for food, water, shelter, jobs, incomes, health, safety, and other basic survival needs. No one will be immune from the physical, social, psychological, and emotional consequences of these impacts. Existing individualized mental health and psychosocial services, as well as disaster response programs cannot address these challenges. Instead, we must think and act through a population lens–not an individualized or isolated group-by-group perspective. This involves organizing diverse, multi-sectoral networks in every urban neighborhood and community that use a public health approach to provide Mutual Support for All. This webinar will explain why Mutual Support for All is essential, what it entails, and how to form these networks. It will also share specific "protective factors" needed to provide Mutual Support for All in communities.

Educational Goal

This workshop will enhance participants’ professional knowledge and competence by introducing the MAFA (Mutual Aid for All) framework as a population-level, community-based mental health strategy. Participants will gain skills to organize multi-sectoral networks, apply a public health lens to resilience, and practice Transformational Resilience techniques that support mental wellness in the face of the climate-ecosystem-biodiversity (C-E-B) crisis.

Learning Objectives

Participants will be able to:

  • Recognize differences between individualized and population-based approaches to wellness and resilience.

  • Identify the application of MAFA in different settings.

  • Identify the application of Mutual Support For All in different settings.

  • Identify specific "protective factors" communities can use to build population-level mental wellness and resilience.

Target Audience

  • Addiction Professional
  • Counselor
  • Marriage & Family Therapist
  • Nurse
  • Physician
  • Psychologist
  • Social Worker

Presenters

Bob Doppelt, PhD 🇺🇸
Bob Doppelt founded and coordinates the International Transformational Resilience Coalition (ITRC), a network of mental health, social service, disaster management, climate, and faith organizations and professionals (website: http://itrcoalitionorg). He is trained in both counseling psychology and environmental science and has combined the two fields throughout his career. He is also a Graduate of the International Program on the Management of Sustainability, in Ziest, The Netherlands, a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Instructor, a meditation instructor at Spirit Rock in California, and a former Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. Early in his career Bob worked as a counseling psychologist with troubled youth and their families. Decades later he directed the Climate Leadership Initiative at the University of Oregon, a climate change research and technical assistance program that was one of the first in the U.S. to assist private and public entities to develop climate mitigation and adaptation plans. For many years he also taught systems thinking and climate change policy at the university. Through this work Bob realized that the mental health and psycho-social-spiritual impacts of the climate crisis were a significant but largely unaddressed problem. This led him in 2013 to organize the ITRC. In 2024, the ITRC’s work helping communities worldwide organize Transformational Resilience Coordinating Networks (TRCNs) to prevent and heal climate-generated traumas led it to become the 35th partner of the UN High Level Climate Champion Race to Resilience Campaign. Due to his many years of work, in 2015 Bob was named one the world’s “50 Most Talented Social Innovators” by the World CRS Congress. For over a decade Bob wrote a monthly column on climate change and psychosocial issues for the Register Guard, his hometown paper. Bob has also written for Psychology Today and currently writes a monthly column on Substack. He is the author of a number of books on the interface between individual and community mental health, social change, and ecological regeneration. His most recent book is Preventing and Healing Climate Traumas: A Guide for Building Resilience and Hope in Communities (Taylor and Francis/Routledge Publishing, 2023). It describes the outcomes of an intensive two+ year research project that determined that a public health approach to mental health is necessary to prevent and heal the accelerating individual, community, and societal traumas generated by the global climate mega-emergency. This involves returning the responsibility for sustaining mental wellness and resilience to where it existed for most of human history and has the greatest chances of success: to the neighborhood and community levels.

Financially Sponsored By

  • GXC Events - The Global Exchange Conference