Resilient futures: An individual and system-level approach to improve the well-being and resilience of disadvantaged young Australians.

Abstract

Young people living with disadvantage are at elevated risk of a range of negative life outcomes, including social exclusion, impaired health and well-being, and low educational or vocational participation. In this context, the Resilient Futures program was conceptualized and developed as a strength-focused and positive psychology intervention whose design was underpinned by a broad interdisciplinary range of scientific evidence. The program utilizes an ecological framework that sought to target key proximal and distal factors associated with youth social exclusion, disengagement, and disadvantage. The target participant group was 850 disadvantaged young South Australians (aged 16 to 21) drawn from a number of educational, mental health, and youth justice agencies who were project partners in codesigning and supporting the implementation. The intervention was designed to build well-being and resilience skills through explicit (direct teaching) and implicit (mentoring, case management) teaching methods, supported by systemfocused methods that build the capacity of service providers. This article describes the iterative development of the Resilient Futures program, including a significant early program reorientation toward the use of a nonprescriptive and flexible delivery method. This pivot was guided by the implementation science literature, and underpinned by an intentional practice model and approach that was operationalized at both the program design and service delivery layers of the program. We summarize key challenges in delivering a well-being and resilience program across multiple sites for a disadvantaged cohort, and the methods the project team developed to bring focus to implementation quality and rigor. Preliminary qualitative evidence supporting the effectiveness of the program is also provided. What is the significance of this article for the general public?Delivering mental health interventions to young people is challenging and complex. For the last 2 years, the Well-being and Resilience Centre has delivered a largescale evidence-based program called Resilient Futures to build resilience in some of the most disadvantaged young people in South Australia. This article serves as an innovative case study of how the science of well-being and resilience can be translated into practice but also outlines the challenges faced in delivering this project and the new methodologies developed to overcome them.

Improving the Wellbeing of Female Prisoners via Psychological Skills Training: A Feasibility Study

“…The train-the-trainer approach was successful as trainers brought cultural competence, appropriate worked examples, experience, and qualifications of working with the unique cohort. The use of train-the-trainer methodology to deliver psychological skills training has been successfully used in various Australian populations including older aged carers and disadvantaged youth (Bartholomaeus et al., 2019; Raymond et al., 2018) pointing to its utility as an efficient method of delivery of basic psychological skills training across society. This method may be particularly relevant for the Aboriginal context, as this approach enabled the intervention to align with proposed principles of Aboriginal Prisoner Health and Wellbeing models of care (Sivak et al., 2017).…”

“…The training program was based on the TechWerks Resilience Training program (www.technologywerks.com and www.4-9-north.com), which combines content derived from positive psychology interventions (Bolier et al., 2013; Hone et al., 2015) and psychological treatment methods such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (A. C. Butler et al., 2006) and Mindfulness (Gu et al., 2015). The training is a multi-component program comprising of a set of techniques designed to increase one’s sense of wellbeing and resilience and has been tested in a range of populations including older aged carers, health services staff, and disadvantaged youth (Bartholomaeus et al., 2019; Raymond et al., 2018; van Agteren et al., 2018). See Table 1 for the exact wellbeing and resilience skills taught in this study.…”

Quality of attachment, trauma, psychopathology, and frequency of non-suicidal self-injury in Mexican adolescents suffering from psychosocial vulnerability: Description of a risk profile

“…Related to NSSI, a poorly studied sector on clinical population are adolescents who suffer from psychosocial vulnerability conditions, a group that Raymond, Iasiello, Jarden, and Kelly (2018) call disadvantaged young people. The concept refers to the group of individuals that present one or more risk factors, such as suffering from a mental disorder, dropping out of school, problems with justice, coming from contexts of marginalization and poverty, among others.…”

Resumen de tesis. Análisis de determinantes de la calidad de vida de alumnos con necesidades específicas de apoyo educativo y sin ellas

“…• El Programa de Futuros Resilientes (Raymond, Iasiello, Jarden y Kelly, 2018). Se trata de una intervención basada en el desarrollo de fortalezas, realizada desde un marco ecológico de psicología positiva y fundamentada en la evidencia científica multidisciplinar.…”

“…Es necesario involucrar a los niños como expertos de su propia experiencia en la planificación e implementación de las prácticas educativas escolares (Rebekah, Walsh y Baird, 2016). Su inclusión en los procesos de organización y ejecución de programas para el desarrollo afecta positivamente al compromiso del niño en la realización de actividades (Nielsen, Mushin y Nielsen, 2017;Majnemer et al, 2010;Pearrow et al, 2020), e impacta sobre sus niveles de participación en actividades diversas (Everley y Macfadyen, 2015;Raymond et al, 2018), desarrollo de las fuentes de resiliencia (Edbom, et al, 2010;King et al, 2003;Imms et al, 2016b;) y bienestar infantil (Almqvist et al, 2006;Bult et al, 2014;Shikako-Thomas et al, 2012). Para ello, y tal como se ha evidenciado en esta tesis, es preciso conocer qué experiencias de vida son importantes y significativas para ellos, qué factores y procesos contribuyen a su adaptación y bienestar (Oshri et al, 2017), así como en qué medida estos son similares o diferentes a los de la población infantil general u otras poblaciones específicas de niños.…”