Two Days with Michael Ungar: Nurturing the Hidden Resilience of At-Risk Children and Families across Cultures and Contexts

Thursday 8 & Friday 9 October 2009
Harold Park Function Centre, Glebe

This two-day workshop challenges professionals working with children, youth and families labelled ‘dangerous’, ‘deviant’, ‘delinquent’ and ‘disordered’ to better understand problem behaviours. Based on research with high-risk young people around the world, a culturally sensitive model of intervention will be presented that nurtures young people’s ‘hidden resilience’.

While we commonly think of resilience as an individual’s capacity to ‘beat the odds’ and overcome great adversity, this workshop focuses on how mental health professionals and human service providers can ‘change the odds’ to make resilience more likely to occur. An integrative strengths-based model of practice will be discussed and its application in child welfare, mental health, education and correctional settings explored. Using interactive exercises, clinical transcripts and video recordings of work with children and families, Michael will show how this model of practice helps professionals discover the pathways to resilience young people use to survive and thrive. This culturally sensitive approach avoids the ”resistance” commonly found when those intervening label and stigmatise those they are trying to help.

This workshop both explores this model of treatment and gives participants an opportunity to discuss the most challenging children, youth and families with whom they work.

Workshop Goals

• Understand how ‘problem’ individuals use their behaviours to enhance their resilience and well-being across cultures and contexts
• Identify examples of strengths-based practice participants already find helpful
• Become familiar with the principles of an engaging strengths-based model of individual and family intervention (including elements of solution-focused, postmodern/constructionist, and ecological therapeutic techniques) suitable for work in multiple service settings
• Explore and apply a model of practice which helps clinicians, families and communities identify and build upon unconventional patterns of coping
• Develop a strategy for working without resistance with different types of hard-to-reach individuals and families, based on examples drawn from participants’ own practice.

Workshop Agenda

Day One

• Defining resilience
• Protective processes against risk: Creative solutions to complex problems in poorly resourced environments
• Building resilience across contexts (race, gender, class, ability, sexual orientation, culture, geography) and the challenges each presents
• The five phases of intervention: Engage; Assess; Contract; Work; Transition
• Case illustrations

Day Two

• A three-part model of intervention to promote resilience: 1. Reflecting 2. Challenging 3. Defining
• Case discussion (from audience)
• Principles of intervention
• Working within systems and with our colleagues: Promoting a strengths perspective while avoiding burnout

About the Presenter

Michael Ungar PhD, (AAMFT Clinical Supervisor; Registered Social Worker) is both a Social Worker and Marriage and Family Therapist with over 25 years experience working directly with youth and families in child welfare, mental health, education and correctional settings.

Michael is now a University Research Professor and Professor at the School of Social Work at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. As the Director of the Resilience Research Centre, he currently leads a number of studies of resilience involving researchers from more than a dozen countries on six continents.

Michael has conducted workshops internationally on resilience-related themes relevant to the treatment and study of at-risk youth and families and has published over 60 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on the topic. He is also the author of eight books including:

• Strengths-Based Counseling with At-Risk Youth
• We Generation: Raising Socially Responsible Kids
• Playing at Being Bad: The Hidden Resilience of Troubled Teens, and
• Too Safe for Their Own Good: How Risk and Responsibility Help Teens Thrive.

In addition to his research and teaching, Michael maintains a family therapy practice in association with Phoenix Youth Programs, a prevention program for street youth and their families, and since 2002 has sat on the Board of Examiners for the Nova Scotia Association of Social Workers. Michael lives in Halifax with his partner and two teenage children.

Fees & Registration

Enquiries

Email or phone: 02 9351 8520