Project Description

A Citizen Diplomacy Action Fund (#CDAF) Rapid Response Grant in support of community resilience and engagement in direct response to the coronavirus. The Citizen Diplomacy Action Fund is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and implemented by Partners of the Americas in partnership with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

The project addresses the ongoing challenge of training and supporting mental health professionals to work effectively and sustainably with families on issues of psychosocial resilience. This type of training support is costly and inaccessible to many in low- and middle- income countries and is particularly needed during a public health emergency. To meet this challenge, we are developing virtual, open-access, professional content specific to global family systems approaches and psychosocial resilience during Covid19, and to explore the public mental health interventions used to reduce risk and promote family and community well-being during the pandemic.

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We will focus on the role of family and community mental health and psychosocial support and resilience in both stable and unstable environments, complex situations including ongoing and historical armed conflict, low-resource settings, and high income countries—each having to meet unique challenges to support families and community during this health emergency.

This project is based on systemic understandings inherent to supporting other people, as well as ourselves, during a crisis. Working confidently and competently with the psychosocial needs of families and the resilience of their lives and communities during the Covid19 pandemic requires enhancing our understanding of how the logic of systemic family therapy and theory is and can be applied across states, by listening and learning in exchange with each other. The series of panels we will develop and distribute as outlined in this project will provide public mental health professionals and all interested parties a guide to the technical skills, range of knowledge, and methods of best practice required to work effectively and internationally with families' psychosocial resilience, through an exchange of ideas between professionals across the globe. In each panel we will take a systemic lens to conceptualizing psychosocial resilience.

We will consider the role of family focused psychotherapeutic intervention across global settings, and discuss the intra- professional/interdisciplinary skills required to support families' psychosocial resilience during this pandemic.