Promoting Resilience Strategies: A Modified Consultation Model

Abstract

A new paradigm in the field of adolescent substance abuse prevention seeks to enhance resilience rather than focus on risk factors. Resilience is the capacity to maintain competent functioning in the face of major life stressors. Whereas risk-factor interventions target pathology, injury, and deficits, resilience-factor interventions emphasize coping skills and protective environmental agents. This article describes a project guided by the resilience paradigm. Using a modified consultation model, a team of social workers worked with groups of substance abuse prevention personnel in one community-based and one school-based program serving adolescents in inner-city neighborhoods. Using this model, which emphasizes relationship and collaboration, the workers not only learned resilience concepts for use with young people, but also increased their own resilience.