The Resilience Course
The Resilience Course is designed to enable church members, leaders and staff to connect regionally with Anglican colleagues on learning exchanges on resilience & response.
Each two-hour session has a particular theme and consists of a Bible reflection and a recorded thought piece, followed by live discussion in which participants reflect together and learn from one another. Themes covered include:
- climate resilience
- coping with trauma
- women and girls in humanitarian responses
- targeting marginalised populations
- safeguarding
- networking for greater impact
- caring for the caregiver.
The goal of each session is to build the participants’ capacity to respond and improve their community engagement. Following each session there is a homework assignment, designed to take up to one hour.
“Learners have expressed their excitement at the opportunity to engage in Portuguese and to connect with other learners from Angola and Brazil, as well as facilitators from different countries – a celebration of unity in diversity…. An adventure in the future, perhaps, will be to include resilience content in our Sunday school and catechesis class curriculum, so that we have a generation of young people aware and ready as far as resilience is concerned.”
“I took the Resilience Course because I realised we need to be prepared for, not surprised by, climate-influenced events such as floods and fires… and even the COVID-19 pandemic, which has exposed our weaknesses and the need for the Church to be an agent of hope. The highlight of the Resilience Course for me was recognising that, while our cultures and geography may be different, many of the events we face are the same around the world.”
In the video, course participants describe what the course is about and give a flavour of how diverse and inclusive the course is. As Dr Janice Proud says,“Much like the disciples at Pentecost, this video celebrates the many voices and languages of our gathered learners and the spirit of the course.”
The video is also available with subtitles in Portuguese, Spanish, French, Burmese, Tagalog, KiSwahili and Arabic.
A press release about the video launch, which includes much of the information on this page, is available in Portuguese, Spanish, French, Burmese, Arabic and English.
Read more: global roll out in 2021
The Resilience Course was first rolled out in 2021 as a global, online course. It comprised 10 monthly sessions facilitated in 6 languages and each session takes place four times to allow people in different times zones of the world to participate.
The course proved enormously popular. Over 140 people from 42 countries representing 23 provinces of the Anglican Communion enrolled.
Watch the video below to find out more.
Following the success of the global course, regional courses are now being rolled out, facilitated by regional steering groups.
How and why did the course come about?
The Resilience course is the result of three years of collaboration, exploration and sharing between the Anglican Alliance and Anglican churches and agencies across the Communion – especially Episcopal Relief & Development – an initiative called Partners in Resilience and Response (PiRR). PiRR grew out of the recognition that , as the number of disasters increases across the globe (in part due to climate change), building resilience and the ability to respond will be ever more vital.
PiRR is a Communion-wide programme to do just that. After pilots in different regions, the Resilience course was launched last October to increase the reach and impact of PiRR.
To express interest in future courses please email: anglicanalliance@anglicancommunion.org