Conference gathers forces for community resiliency

Resilience has become a “hot button” element of ensuring survival, well-being, and success in many spheres of modern life—individuals and families, business and industry, faith, personal finance, education, sports, religion, health care; it’s a long list.

There are few realms, however, in which building resilience at personal and societal levels is viewed as more essential than in the nurturing and protection of our most precious resource: children.

Resilience involves both the ability to cope with the stresses of everyday life and the ability to recover from trauma. It is considered as the key part of preventing and responding to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).

Developing resilience at a community-wide level and spreading essential knowledge about ACEs and protective factors requires collaboration between a variety of community organizations and individuals. These partnerships create opportunities to improve children’s health, encourage more effective parenting, and connect children and families with stronger support systems and positive social networks. From those outcomes emerge stronger communities.

One Place and many of our partners in this effort are members of TASCO, a community multidisciplinary task force that is a project of Jacksonville and Onslow County local governments. TASCO is an acronym for Turning Adversity into Success for Children in Onslow.

“Be Informed. Be the Change.” was the theme of recent conference at the New River YMCA building in Jacksonville. Organized by members of TASCO with the involvement of members of the One Place team, the conference was sponsored by United Way along with affiliate sponsors Trillium Health Resources and Foster Family Alliance of North Carolina. Organizers estimated about 70 people participated.

The centerpiece of the day-long program was a morning training session on the Community Resiliency model, presented by trainers Amy Read and Kate Schultz. It was followed by an afternoon showing of the groundbreaking film “Resilience: The Biology of Stress and the Science of Hope” with a tandem roundtable discussion. Our team members, Joe Coffey and Christina Malu led those discussions.

Concluding the TASCO conference program were three afternoon breakout sessions: a showing and discussion of the documentary “Darkness to Light” on the topic of preventing child sexual abuse, led by Tina Morris and Sarah Anders; a presentation on Internet safety by New River YMCA Program Director Atrez Timpson; and a discussion of coping skills led by PEERS Family Development Center Executive Director Tondrea Leach, who also heads TASCO.

The resiliency program was the first of a series of conferences planned by TASCO, all open to the public and focused on building a safer environment for children. “We had many new faces attending the conference, which was wonderful,” Leach said.

(For more information on TASCO and attending future conferences, follow the Onslow County TASCO page on Facebook.)

Here are several other takeaways from the recent conference on resiliency:

Building resilience requires development of certain core skills and an understanding of the key role of emotional and biological factors.

The program for the Community Resiliency Model was written by Elaine Miller-Karas and developed by the Trauma Resource Initiative. “Resiliency is an individual’s and community’s ability to identify and use individual and collective strategies in living fully with compassion in the present moment and to thrive while managing the activities of daily living,” Miller-Karas said in 2020.

Skills such as “grounding” to sense physical contact with inanimate objects to become more aware and more balanced in their surroundings (by standing against a wall, for example), or “conversational resourcing” to build personal connections by probing for familiar details, all are strategies that help people get “in a zone” that leads to better and calmer decision-making. People can learn how to pay attention to feelings and biological cues that will alert them that they may be out of their “Resilient Zone.”

The information gained through the model’s techniques builds awareness of potential problems such as child abuse so they can be addressed. “If we aren’t aware of any of this, how can we do something about it?” Read said.

While parents and other custodians play a lead role in protecting children, a strong network of defense requires many points of light.

The conference drew professionals from a variety of fields—social workers, educators, Health Department Staff, police officers, therapists, and counselors from both civilian and military communities and a strong showing of presenters and other staff from One Place. The common thread was an interest in helping children and parents and better themselves.

Among those in attendance also was the staff of Zing Zumm! Children’s Museum, located in Jacksonville. Museum Executive Director Samantha Plocica said her staff wants to become better educated about its role in helping to confront community issues such as child abuse. “We want to be aware of how important it is for the staff to make those real connections with students,” she said. “We want to learn about ways that we can start to do something about (abuse).”

Plocica said the staff also recognizes opportunities to model positive practices when interacting with parents. “We are not a drop-off location,” she said. “We don’t just program for children, we’re actually interacting with parents, and we’ve noticed that there’s a lot of mirroring that happens.

“One of our favorites is instead of saying ‘Stop running” to a child, we’ll say, ‘Please use your walking.’” In subsequent visits, many parents adopt the less-threatening language. Plocica described a “rub-off effect” that particularly helps young military parents who have moved away from traditional family role models.

This conference on resiliency was a first for TASCO and was held in one of several new community centers that will increase and improve Onslow County’s resources for children.

The Resiliency Conference was an extension of “community cafes” that TASCO held in various locations to build awareness but were waylaid by the recent pandemic. The conference format is a deeper dive into relevant topics.

TASCO is working with One Place to plan a Community Services Day in May and a continuation of a series of informational “town hall” meetings with resource tables set up for professionals in Onslow. “I would like to see TASCO to get more involvement with the medical and faith communities to get resiliency and ACEs training,” she said.

Training provided by One Place and its TASCO partners will receive a big boost with the completion of conference facilities as part of the expansion of One Place services through the SECU Hope Center, a state-of-the-art, multi-purpose building now under construction in Jacksonville Commons. Click here for more information on SECU Hope Center.