Nov 01, 2007

Jason Newberry, a Senior Researcher at CCBR, interviews Jack Styan, Executive Director of Planned Lifetime Advocacy Network (PLAN), about his organization's approach to developing social networks for people with disabilities and how this approach links to the concept of resiliency.

In the most general sense, a person's "resilience" refers to their ability to survive, adapt, and thrive in spite of adverse circumstances or environments.¹ The basic idea of resilience is familiar to us all in the many stories we have hear about the triumph of disadvantaged individuals over terrible odds to achieve success of some kind -- escaping poverty, abuse, isolation, discrimination, and many other overwhelming difficulties.

Witnessing resiliency, however, is lot easier than understanding how it is achieved. If you delve deeper, it becomes decidedly more complex. Why are some people more resilient than others? Alongside social science definitions, the fields of environmental science and ecology introduced the concept of "resilient systems". A resilient ecological system is characterized by its ability to readily adapt to change in one part of the system while still retaining overall function. ² The interdependency of parts is key, because they all contribute to the whole. If you remove or otherwise compromise too many parts of the system, it collapses and fails to adapt.

People concerned with a more holistic view of human development have drawn from ecological systems theory. If people's health is determined by multiple, interconnected factors (e.g., access to shelter, employment, education, nutritious food, health care, knowledge & skills, social connections, freedom from discrimination, and so on) then improving people's lives must somehow involve impacting as many of these factors as possible. Too often, however, services and supports for people are fragmented and focus on only one aspect of person's life, while not considering the whole

If human social life is a system, what makes it interconnected? The simple but crucial answer is "people." On a fundamental level, all aspects of life are influenced by the actions of the people one is connected to. Too often, people do poorly in life because positive connections are too few. It follows then that a very powerful approach to enhancing resiliency would be to focus on improving the social networks of those who are at risk.

This is the guiding rationale for Planned Lifetime Advocacy Network, a non-profit social enterprise that was founded in British Columbia over 20 years ago. PLAN's mission is to help families secure the future for their family member with a disability by ending isolation and loneliness, creating financial security, ensuring choice and enabling everyone to make a contribution. I asked Jack Styan, executive director, how PLAN achieves these goals:

Jack Styan: PLAN assists family members in securing a good life for their relative with a disability and at the same time answering that question that pretty much every family member faces, which is, what's going to happen to my relative with a disability when I am not here to care for them any longer? What evolved over time was the concept of developing a social network around a person because many people with disabilities are isolated. We hire a "community connector" who goes out and examines the existing network, and works to strengthen it. This involves creating or nurturing a network around the person. What we found is that people in the community who might not be expected to make a contribution to others' lives are really quite open to it. Both the people who join the network and the people with disabilities have told us that the benefits are quite remarkable.

I asked Jack if he could provide some examples of how PLAN has worked in the past. He talked at length about a man named Gordon who was one of the first people to connect with PLAN:

J.S.: When we met Gordon, he was living alone with his father. Before his mother had passed away, she had made her husband promise that he would do something about Gordon. At the time we met him, Gordon spent most of his time in his bedroom. He had been in group homes but it hadn't worked out. He had been identified as having many problems. He was a big guy, kind of gruff, and didn't talk too much. Things in the community hadn't worked for him. We hired a facilitator to work with Gordon. It wasn't easy at the start. It took her probably six months or so to really make a connection with Gordon and to figure out what "made hime tick". The first time they tried to bring people together as a network for him, he wouldn't even come in the room. He basically stood by the doorway and just listened.

What happened was that over time the facilitator gained some trust, got to know him and found out that he really liked horses. She happened to have a friend with a horse who said that if Gordon was interested in horses, he'd be welcome to visit the horse and brush her, clean out the stable, and so on. When the facilitator mentioned this to Gordon, he got really excited. That was the first time she had seen him excited about anything. In fact, the next morning he phoned her to ask "When can I go?" He immediately took to the horse, and just seemed to have a natural connection. He started mucking out the stable, brushing the horse, and feeding her and it wasn't very long before the stable manager noticed him. Probably within 3 months or so he had hired Gordon as an attendant at the stable and, nearly 20 years later, he is still employed there. His network grew very quickly after that because he began to meet people at the stable who were interested in horses. It just opened up a life for him.

His father said, "Well, Gordon doesn't seem to need me as much anymore. I'm retired and I've always wanted to move up the Sunshine Coast." So that's what he did. The network found Gordon a place to live, got him settled, and kind of looked out for him and Gordon has been living on his own with his network support since then. That's kind of an amazing story in terms of what can happen in someone's life. Gordon very easily could have been someone who got stuck in a group home, identified as a behaviour problem, and was constantly poorly served because no one knew who he was or what he loved to do.

Jack and I talked more specifically about how developing social networks promotes resiliency in people. He used the metaphor of natural ecologies and the ways in which organisms are interdependent and reliant on one another to thrive:

J.S.: If we think of people as organisms in a larger system, the resiliency of the person is really their interdependency with other people in that system. And the system's resiliency is really the interrelationship of the people within it. Few of us go through our entire life without at least needing to connect with people at an emotional level or needing advice from time to time. There are numerous things that we need help with in our lives and that are facilitated by relationships. What the network does is create relationships among a group of people and resiliency is built within the network. It's not that a network forms and then never changes, it is like an ecosystem, change in individual's lives and the lives of groups is constant. Change is just part of life . Sometimes changes are negative, sometimes they are positive, but change is always there. Having a network just makes people more resilient through that change.

Jack illustrated the power of a network in the face of change with a recent real- life example:

J.S.: Last year we had a fellow who was diagnosed with a brain tumor and subsequently passed away and we saw his network - this network was always there in his life - but we saw his network come together in a different way when his needs changed. They set up a roster when he went into the hospital. He had visitors almost all the time. The hospital said, "We've never had a patient who had this many visitors." Just amazing. And it was the same when he eventually ended up in a hospice. Who in that time of our life doesn't want to be surrounded by people who care about us?

The rationale of PLAN reinforces the point that our assets as individuals lie with others because others collectively provide a range of natural supports - friendship, caring, advice, practical help, and so on. These natural relationships are flexible, diverse, consistent, and reciprocal - features of strength that formal, professional services have difficulty emulating. PLAN helps to support what most of us take for granted: that everyone deserves a good life, feelings of safety security for the future, meaningful connections to friends and family, and the opportunity to make contribution in their day-to-day life.

For more information on PLAN's mission, mandate, stories and social advocacy work, please see their website at www.plan.ca.

Special thanks to Jaime Clark for transcribing the interview.

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