Pathways to Resilience III: Beyond Nature vs. Nurture

People with Disabilities – Creating Opportunities for Resilience
Speaker: Robyn Munford
This workshop will explore how we can work alongside people with disabilities to create opportunities for resilience. Central to this approach is learning how to build meaningful and enduring partnerships that enable a sense of belonging and that achieve full inclusion and participation in communities. A key focus is on understanding the significant role of support networks including family members, support workers, friends, and community resources. Strengths and citizenship approaches are explored in this workshop. Such approaches accentuate the need to understand the diversity of experience and maintain a focus on how support systems and services can strive to uphold the rights and wellbeing of people with disabilities. The workshop will present a framework that has been used in communities to create respectful and authentic partnerships between people with disabilities and their support networks. This framework takes account of meaning systems, context and experience. Taking an ecological approach to resilience, it focuses on the interaction between the person and their environment and the factors that promote inclusion and full participation of people with disabilities in community life.