Summary

The author frames this chapter’s discussion on the power and value of building resilience in and through community with references to the well-known story of how members of a rugby team survived a plane crash in the Andes Mountains in the early 1970’s. Those survivors, she says, credit their experience as a community and as a team, both before the crash and after, with providing a powerful and effective context for that survival – that and hope, the belief that the future can and will improve.

Hope, the author says, is a particularly valuable experience, in that it actively and directly combats one of the three P’s – the sense of permanence that comes with grief in the aftermath of trauma. At the same time, she adds, it is essential to develop an experience of resilience within a community and...