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Collaboration Can Help Foster Kid's Resiliency
by, Robert Linquanti, Western Regional Center for Drug-Free Schools & Communities, Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following article is excerpted from a recent paper, Using Community-Wide Collaboration to Foster Resiliency in Kids: A Conceptual Framework, in which Robert Linquanti makes a case for relating Bonnie Benard's resiliency model to the process of collaboration at the community level.

For those involved in delivering and improving effective services for children, collaboration is an idea whose time has come. With the growing awareness that our fragmented delivery of services to families and children has been underachieving at best, collaboration across agencies and with communities has quickly become a key strategy to try to improve program effectiveness and outcomes.

There has been a veritable campaign during the past three years to better understand collaboration, reflecting the many efforts to use it to improve, if not transform, our current system of fragmented services. The current system's shortcomings are well-documented:

Reactive crisis management precludes prevention and early intervention
Rigid, category-driven programs focus on treating symptoms rather than their underlying causes
Lack of communication, coordination, and proximity among agencies serving children and families creates a bureaucratic obstacle course of protocols and prerequisites that virtually assures service gaps, duplication, and ineffective outcomes

Fighting Fragmentation

Thus, collaborative efforts have been driven largely by a conceptual framework of integrating services to fight fragmentation, with the goal of better orchestrating accessible, comprehensive services to meet the interrelated needs of children and families. In the many interagency efforts to link existing programs and integrate services, collaborators across agencies are overcoming structural and technical challenges through better inter-organizational communication and employee cross-training, joint planning and resource pooling, co-location of services, and simplified eligibility and confidentiality requirements.

But what we are learning, and in a sense knew all along, is that interagency collaboration, though worthy and necessary, is insufficient to realize our ultimate vision. As Lisbeth Schorr recently warned, we must not become "so absorbed by the difficulty and complexity of what we are trying to change at the system level, that we lose sight of the goal of improving the lives of children and families."

Many are re-focusing attention to this basic, human level and posing some real challenges to human service professionals. Several experts on collaboration recently have reminded us that the people we most need to actively involve as key players in the collaboration process are the very children, families, and communities we hope to help. As national child policy expert Sid Gardner emphasizes, "Trusting a community to help itself, and equipping it to do so, can release a storehouse of energy that will be one of the most important local policy resources of the 1990's."

Along with this clear emphasis to involve and empower families and communities to help themselves comes the need to build on their capacities, skills, and assets, rather than to focus primarily on their deficits, weaknesses, and problems.

Community development experts John McKnight and John Kretzmann state,"Communities have never been built upon their deficiencies," but upon "mobilizing the capacities and assets of a people and a place."

Furthermore, even as we are challenged to promote collaborations that communities own and drive, and that focus on individual and family strengths, those in youth development tell us that the risk-reduction focus of so many of our collaborative efforts could prove inadequate. Youth development expert Karen Pittman advocates"a wide-spread conceptual shift from thinking that youth problems are the principal barrier to youth development to thinking that youth development is the most effective strategy for the prevention of youth problems."

Youth advocate and collaboration expert William Lofquist also reminds us that"only when adults view and respect young people as resources from the time of their birth are we likely to create organizational and youth opportunity system cultures that in fact promote the well-being of young people."

These youth experts point out that our role is not to fix kids' problems or to treat them as recipients or objects of youth programs; it is to provide them with ample opportunities today to develop their competencies so they can meet their own needs to contribute and be connected to a coherent, caring community.

A New Paradigm

These perspectives form the contours of a new paradigm that challenges collaborating service professionals in these ways:

Getting community ownership, not just representation.
Developing and utilizing people's strengths, capacities, and assets, not targeting and treating their deficiencies, weaknesses, and problems.
Moving beyond risks to actively engage children and develop their competencies.

This new paradigm is forcing us to revisit the ultimate vision guiding our collaborative efforts. For if we are serious about prevention, then our ultimate vision lies beyond integrated service delivery, improved outcomes, and risk reduction.

Our ultimate vision will be of children, families, and communities that are healthy, empowered, self-sustaining, and self-helping--not dependent, but independent and interdependent. Collaborators who seek to involve and empower children, families, and communities in achieving this vision are more likely to succeed if they infuse their collaborative efforts with resiliency principles.

Resiliency refers to that quality in children who, though exposed to significant stress and adversity in their lives, do not succumb to the school failure, substance abuse, mental health, and juvenile delinquency problems they are at greater risk of experiencing. Over many years, researchers have identified protective factors present in these kids' family, school, and community environments. These factors foster the development of resilient attributes, which in turn help kids successfully avoid, minimize, or overcome risks.

In her synthesis of the resiliency literature, Benard describes the key protective factors found in these kids' families, schools, and communities:

Having a caring and supportive relationship with at least one person
Communicating consistently clear, high expectations to the child
Providing ample opportunities for the child to participate in and contribute meaningfully to his or her social environment

The presence of these protective factors helps foster the growth of a resilient child--which, according to Benard, is one who is socially competent, with problem-solving skills and a sense of his or her own autonomy, purpose, and future. These resilient attributes are more likely to develop in kids whose environments have adults and youth who provide these protective factors.

And while we know only too well that adding risk factors multiplies the likelihood of health-compromising choices, we need also to remember that adding protective factors--via families, schools, and religious and youth-serving organizations throughout the community--counteracts that likelihood with equal power.

Resiliency Framework

To help us meet the challenges placed on our collaborative efforts and realize our vision of involved families within empowered communities that together bring up resilient children, the resiliency framework, with its protective factors and resilient attributes, offers collaborators significant advantages:

It necessarily makes our collaborations inclusive by recognizing that all adults within a child's environment have an active, critical role to play. Moreover, their understanding and owning this role genuinely empowers them. Collaborations that foster resiliency are more than client-friendly systems for multiple service consumption; they're user-driven processes that promote protection and nurture resilient attributes. Service professionals can facilitate that process and encourage that ownership by modeling the very same protective factors with their newfound partners.
It offers a compelling metaphor to guide our collaborations-- that of working together to build environments rich in protection for children. The emphasis is on the environment, not on fixing kids' behaviors, or on doing anything to them. Indeed, kids are not responsible for becoming resilient; adults are responsible for working together to provide kids with caring and support, high expectations, and opportunities to participate in meaningful activities. To the extent that adults do this, they encourage the natural development of resilient attributes in kids. Thus, resiliency is an outcome of collaboration.
It does not orient our collaborations around deficiencies and risks, but instead recognizes and builds on participants' strengths and capacities. This positive focus can move participants away from the pessimism and burn-out which often plague collaborators who see themselves in an endless struggle against deficits and risks. This positive outlook also helps service workers to avoid relating to kids and families with the low expectations that can unintentionally engender a learned helplessness.

Not only can a community in collaboration foster resiliency in kids, but the very same protective factors can be used to enhance the collaborative process itself. For successful collaborators, like people building healthy communities, will care for and support one another, have high expectations of each other, and give each other significant opportunities to participate and contribute meaningfully to the collaboration's objectives. In this way, collaborators build an environment of protection for each other.

Collaborations that promote protective factors to foster resiliency in kids are more than theoretical constructs. Preventionists can draw from several tools and programs which are currently being used in communities across the country to actively engage families, schools, community organizations, and youth themselves in building environments rich in protection. For example, cities across the country are using approaches based on resiliency, such as John McKnight's Neighborhood Innovations Network at Northwestern University, the 4H and National Collaboration for Youth's Making the Grade project, and Roger Mills' Health Realization/ Community Empowerment model.

Community wide collaboration based on protective factors is not just the best way to promote resiliency; it may be the only way to create an environment sufficiently rich in protection for kids facing the enormous stresses and risks of growing up in present-day American society. Resiliency-based collaborations are still systemically oriented, yet keep us from losing sight of the human dimension essential to any effective collaborative endeavor.

The guiding principles of resiliency are powerful precisely because they are as basic to healthy human development as they are intuitively appealing. As service professionals dedicated to prevention, each of us can promote protection through caring and supporting each other, relating with high expectations, and providing ample opportunities to contribute.

These very principles embody the spirit of collaboration, and are surely necessary to promote resiliency through protection and achieve our ultimate vision.

For a more complete discussion of resiliency-based collaboration, Linquanti's paper, Using Community-Wide Collaboration to Foster Resiliency in Kids: A Conceptual Framework, is available from the Western Regional Center for Drug-Free Schools and Communities, 101 S.W. Main Street, Suite 500, Portland, Oregon 97204, (503) 275- 9486 or (800) 547-6339, ext. 486.In California, call Far West Laboratory, (415) 565-3000 or Southwest Regional Laboratory Benard's resiliency model is described in her recent paper, Fostering Resiliency in Kids: Protective Factors in the Family, School, and Community, also available from the Western Regional Center.[From Western Center News, December 1992, Vol.6, No.1]