Building Resiliency

FEBRUARY 6, 2024

Students in the SBI Certificate Program

Among the recent efforts of The Solidarity Building Initiative at McCormick Theological Seminary was the completion of a workshop at the Cook County Department of Corrections focused on building resilience facilitated by Jia Johnson. Students learned, practiced, and integrated four spiritual and somatic modalities to build their resilience capacity to respond to life stressors and metabolize trauma in ways that are nurturing and nourishing; not only individually, but collectively.

Workshops like these assist incarcerated students in developing wide-ranging skills that may help them survive their current social location or support them as they move back to their old neighborhoods and prepare them for the workforce or post-secondary education upon release from jail or prison.

Resilience provides an ability to not only overcome challenges and stressors but also to heal from trauma and transform systems of inequity and oppression in nurturing ways. Non-profit Lumos Transforms beautifully states, “Resilience is having the flexible strength to heal trauma, overcome adversity, and transform oppressive systems into spaces where we thrive.”