A Dialogue on Resilience in Palo Alto — December 27, 2015
Since the first community dialogue, held this June, a group of Palo Alto high school alumni has come together to form a group we are calling WOPAC: Wellness and Openness in the Palo Alto Community (find us at https://www.facebook.com/wopac).
We just held our 3rd community dialogue (5th if you include the events at each of the public high schools in November) as part of our Alumni Dialogue Initiative. The topic this month was Resilience.
More than 70 people attended, including current students, alumni, parents, teachers, community members, and health care providers.
We broke into small groups for moderated dialogues, where people shared personal stories about their struggles, their definitions of resilience, and the ways that they were (or were not) able to be resilient. Each group reported back with the major themes that emerged from their dialogue…
… and an open question that arose from the dialogue, and which participants will be asking themselves, the people in their lives, and the community at large.
We might plan dialogues around these themes and questions in the future!
I was particularly interested by the focus on community that arose among the themes and questions. While many people had personal definitions of resilience that were based on individual action, every group emphasized the importance of supportive communities for individual resilience.
We ended the day with networking, open conversation, and lots of snacking — but first, we invited people with resources or requests to introduce themselves to the whole group. The following people provided their contact information and would be happy to communicate about their work:
- Sarah Prahbu (sarahprahbu@gmail.com) invited other parents to a conversation and support group called Parents of Vision that she and her husband started to bring together parents of children with mental health problems. They invite interested parents to contact them.
- Lulu Sapigao (lsapigao@gmail.com), Palo Alto High School class of 2013, is planning a story-telling blog where Palo Alto community members would share their experiences with mental health, resilience, success, and setback.
- Clara Zahorsky (czahorsky@gmail.com) is hoping to offer free yoga and mindfulness classes for Palo Alto teens, and is looking for help finding space and advertising.
- Marianna Grossman (marianna.grossman@gmail.com) is thinking about the relationship between interpersonal resilience for mental health and community resilience to climate change. Please let her know if you are interested in exploring this topic further. Also please sign up for the City of Palo Alto Sustainability and Climate Action Summit on January 24 from 12 noon — 5pm to be held at Jordan Middle School.
Once again, I finished the day feeling uplifted and excited. Despite the fact that we were addressing serious topics — mental illness, suicide, trauma, loss — the day ended with energy and smiles and a sense of hope.
In many ways, we had achieved several of the factors that the group identified as important for resilience: We created a strong, nurturing community space to process and share our emotions, and where we could support and care for others. We named our problems, but we described them with hope and optimism. We validated our struggles, and we recognized our strengths.
WOPAC is in the process of planning future dialogues and structuring our group for the long term — including branching out into other initiatives beyond dialogue, and gathering the community to take action on the themes we have collected in dialogue so far. We are very excited about our future plans! If you are interested in joining our mailing list, or finding out how you can support our events and activities, please email Mingming Caressi at caressi.m@gmail.com, with the subject line “WOPAC”.
P.S. — some of you asked for our group norms, to use for your discussion groups, so I am posting them here:
