Pathways to Resilience III: Beyond Nature vs. Nurture

Abstract #324
Sport for Resilience: Fostering Rural Youth Resilience Through Participation in Non-Therapy Equine-Based Activity 
Presenter: Heather Sansom Co - Presenters: Harry Cummings, Leah Levac
Abstract:
Rural communities in Canada are changing. These changes include widening socioeconomic gaps amongst community members, and degraded infrastructure. Normative adversity associated with youth transition to adulthood is magnified in rural areas, where community-level changes are creating ecological conditions that can adversely affect youth. This leads to need for youth programming that is pro-actively inclusive of resilience needs. Sport-for-development (S4D) explores sport as a vehicle for combining physical and psycho-social development. Studies often show benefits akin to resilience factors. Yet, there are gaps in the research, which creates challenges for efforts to embed resilience goals in community recreation programs. There are very few S4D studies focused specifically on developing resilience amongst rural youth , and virtually no research that considers how program elements contribute to youth resilience. Equine-based therapy programs show resilience-related outcomes for youth, but non-therapy equine-assisted programs have not been studied extensively through a resilience lens, or as a community S4D option.This poster will spark conversation by: a) showing connections between rural needs, equine activity, S4D, and resilience; b) describing the methods and hypotheses of a current research project exploring how youth experience protective factors for resilience through participation in non-therapy equine-assisted programs.