Resiliency and Healthy Communities

The topic of these Fetzer-Wilson Center discussions aims ultimately toward the question, “What makes for healthy communities?” Clearly there exist a wide variety of ways to talk about what might be meant by “healthy.” Some would be inclined toward “harder” quantitative measures and indicators when comparing communities, like employment or poverty rates, access to education, clean water, housing and healthcare. Others may argue that in spite of an indicator like high poverty, people may still be “happy” and would be inclined toward the notion that having good or even the best access to material wealth has rarely in fact translated to healthy communities. Within the wider debate the qualifier chosen for this particular discussion focuses around the concept of resilience that when observed across settings and cultures suggests a capacity to build and sustain healthier communities.

Rather than discuss empirical comparative evidence this brief introductory paper will take a step back and down in order to explore the ways in which we organize our thinking around the concepts of “health” and “community”…