Community Resilience: Innovation, Engagement, and Equity

Community Resilience: Innovation, Engagement and Equity examines the systemic barriers to resilience and proposes community-based solutions; couples rigorous evidence with stories of lived experience; and shares diverse perspectives from policymakers, formerly incarcerated individuals, award-winning journalists, public health officials, and many more.

In this fifth volume of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Culture of Health book series, Community Resilience: Equitable Practices for an Uncertain Future highlights the importance of resilience, or the set of assets that allow a person or place to recover when adversity hits, by illustrating the policies and stories of lived experience surrounding health equity. Whether that adversity is acute—such as an environmental disaster or an abuse of police power—or chronic—such as that engendered by poverty and racism—local innovation and community engagement are key to nurturing resilience and promoting health equity.
 
Community Resilience positions storytelling and narrative shifts as essential to influencing our perceptions of who deserves empathy or support, and who does not, by examining the systemic barriers to resilience and the opportunities to reshape the landscape to overcome those barriers. The central message of this volume—across immigration or imprisonment, opioids or trauma, housing or disaster preparedness—is that we must act intentionally and allow a shift in power in order to make progress.

Other books in the series include:

• Knowledge to Action: Accelerating Progress in Health, Well-Being, and Equity
  
• Advancing Health and Well-Being: Using Evidence and Collaboration to Achieve Health Equity
• Well-Being: Expanding the Definition of Progress
• Culture of Health in Practice: Innovations in Research, Community Engagement, and Action
• Necessary Conversations: Understanding Racism as a Barrier to Achieving Health Equity

Community Resilience is edited by Alonzo L. Plough, PhD, MPH, MA, and published by Oxford University Press.

Please email ksilvani@rwjf.org to request a free hard copy.