Teaching Resilience

What is resilience?

Resilience is a term that people are using to describe how we can prepare for the upcoming climate upheavals and the inevitable economic upheavals that will accompany it. We need to build resilience into our institutions and social practices in order to move through what the decisions of the last 50 years are bringing us.

Margrét Pála is an educator in Iceland who has unconventional and useful ideas of how to prepare children for their lives, and subsequently prepare society for our future.

Let's talk about her recommendations:
Training for all human qualities
Compensating for weaknesses of boys' culture and girls' culture
Learning to master your own life
Creating your own solution
Reducing competition
Try new things, break the frame, try unexpected things
Learn to tolerate adversity
Learn to keep trying
Learn to be in community: discipline and identifying with your team
Learn how to handle mistakes
Be responsible
Have courage: being able to stand up and continue.
Or the courage to start over again.
Or to have the courage to tackle difficult tasks
Training to be bored.
Learning to be in community: Closeness, cooperation, having feelings, helping others, respect, communication, how to behave with other people.

Let's share what each of us already knows about these qualities.
(Because all of us already have experience with each one of things things for sure!)

Social Business

Muhammad Yunus is a Bangladeshi social entrepreneur, banker, economist, and civil society leader who was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2006 for founding the Grameen bank and pioneering the concepts of microcredit and microfinance. These loans are given to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans.

All the following are excerpts from a talk he gave at Caixa Forum in Barcelona.

Financial Services are Oxygen
Financial services are like oxygen. we need it to breathe, without it we collapse. The absence of financial oxygen makes people collapse, makes people dysfunction, and we call them poor people. The moment they are connected to financial services, they become alive, they become active, they become creative. that is the story of microcredit.

Social Businesses
The actual financial system is the root of many of the problems that we have created for ourselves.
It's a tricky time to be in. We are in a situation where the whole world is going up in flames: socially, economically and politically. It is rooted in the very concept of the capitalist system.
You can not pass a law to change it, it's not a matter of governmental action. It's a machine that sucks up wealth and sends it out to the sky to a very few people, that's all. It's a one way and a continuously one-way process. Can we make it a two-way process? What comes up, comes down, a circular process, can we do that? Can we do a one-way process, that all the wealth that is accumulated comes down and is shared? Can we do that? Of course, we can do that! For the simple reason that a human can do anything they want if they pay attention. It happens because we don't pay attention.
We created this system, we can un-create it, make it disappear, it's possible.