“Resources for Resilience provides a solid foundation for people to learn, develop, and use practical tools to manage stress and find health, healing, compassion, and connection.

As a leader, I often hear the myriad of reasons that staff seek out a human service profession and, unfortunately, also hear the other side of the story when they decide to leave the profession they love (due to burnout, stress, compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma etc.).

If we, as a community, offer the tools and connection for those staff to stay resilient through adversity, I strongly believe that our retention of well-qualified and compassionate staff would be better, as well as provide a huge perk for new staff coming into the profession to better take care of themselves from the beginning of their careers.

As you can tell, I am passionate about Resources for Resilience and all that it provides to those in the helping professions who we need to stay healthy and resilient to keep up the good work we are all doing.”

Krista E., MSW, LCSWA
Regional Operations Director, RHA Health Services

“As Meridian has learned more about ACEs, the science of resilience and the impact of secondary trauma, all of which are present in our world and our work, we feel it is our responsibility to help address the daily impact stress and trauma have on both our clients and our workforce.

We believe RFR has contributed to the quality of work we do, reduced burnout, and increased retention. Public mental health organizations have so much to hold in the ever-changing climate of the health system, often resulting in staff feeling overwhelmed and burned out.  At the same time, organizations are working hard to bring trauma informed modalities to the clients they serve.

Behavioral health staff are passionate and motivated to support their clients in taking good care of themselves and moving through life’s challenges with resilience, however they often do so at the expense of themselves and their own wellbeing. RFR skills offer behavioral health staff resiliency tools they can use in any moment of uncertainly, change, and difficulty.”

Katie G., LCMHCS, LCAS, CCS
Clinical Director, Meridian Behavioral Health

“Before Resources for Resilience, I thought resiliency was almost toxic positivity. That’s how I had been taught, like resiliency is just pushing through things, grinning and bearing it. After discovering Resources For Resilience, I kind of shifted my perspective to ‘if you’re feeling amped up, here are a couple tools to calm down and get to base’, or, ‘if you’re feeling shut down, here’s a couple tools to bring you back up to base’.  Because when things go poorly in life, you kind of hope that you’re going to rise to the occasion. But no, the body falls to its level of training. It goes back to its default.

I am really blown away by how much I have learned about myself and others through this work. When you’re taught about your own body and how it responds to stress in layman’s terms, you can then easily articulate it to other people. This changed the way I think about how I manage stress in my day to day, and how I can help others.  And when Helene hit, this work let me become a helper in situations where I normally would have felt helpless.”

Julie Steelman, Asheville resident