Building community resilience – where do we start?
As a society, we're more focused than ever on wellbeing and resilience, both physically and mentally. But what is fact and what is fiction? How can we look to research to ensure our own wellbeing in high-pressure situations, and foster resilience as a community or business?
Panellists
Professor Lisa Gibbs
Professor Lisa Gibbs is an international expert on disaster resilience and recovery, working with government, emergency and service provider partners to build new evidence and translate it into practice.
Her leadership of the 10 years Beyond Bushfires study and related research has influenced disaster planning and recovery strategies across Australia and internationally including circulation of the findings and recommendations by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and Red Cross internationally to guide disaster recovery policy and practice.
She has also led highly influential studies of the impacts of natural disasters on child resilience and school staff wellbeing which has triggered substantial government investment in additional school support programs.
Professor Lindsay Oades
Professor Oades is the Director of the Centre for Positive Psychology in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education.
His research interests concern the applications of wellbeing in workplaces, health and education systems. In particular, he has developed intervention and organisational development programs to assist mental health services to become more recovery-oriented, drawing on the empirical bases of positive psychology and wellbeing science. This work is referred to as the Collaborative Recovery Model and Stages of Psychological Recovery – which included a visiting research fellow appointment at Kings College London. His current research program focuses on wellbeing literacy, personalised wellbeing planning and his new comprehensive wellbeing theory, Thriveability Theory. He has written more than 100 refereed journal articles and four books.
In 2015 he received a Vice-Chancellors Award for excellence in research commercialisation. Lindsay is Director of Life Sculpture Pty Ltd, previously non-executive Director for Neami National. He is currently non-executive Director for Action for Happiness Australia and the Positive Education Schools Association.
His previous recent consultancies include the Australian Mental Health Commission, NSW Mental Health Commission, NSW Department of Education and Community. In 2016 he was invited to join the Australian Psychological Society Presidential Initiative to advise on community wellbeing. He served for five years on the scientific advisory panel for the Institute of Coaching at Harvard University’s McLean Hospital. Lindsay’s vision is for all school aged children in Australia to have a personalised wellbeing plan.
Jacqueline Gossip
Jackie Gossip is the Global Head of Continuity of Business and Crisis Management for the Consumer Bank at Citigroup.
Jackie is responsible for leading and overseeing Continuity of Business Planning and Recovery strategies across the Global Consumer Bank, and is ultimately responsible to ensure invocation readiness. Prior to joining Citigroup Jackie led Crisis Management and Business Continuity programs for JPMorgan, UBS and Macquarie Group. These roles allowed her to leverage her technology engineering background when leading incident response, data centre isolation and business resiliency testing.
Jackie has a Masters of Business in Information Technology Management from the University of Technology, Sydney and a Bachelor of Education and Training from Melbourne University. Outside the office, Jackie mentors adult endurance runners who raise funds for youth and community service programs.
Alyssa Trometter | Moderator
Alyssa is the Deputy Director of External Affairs at the Clinton Foundation where she leads academic partnerships, enrolment, engagement, marketing and communications, and the design and implementation of CGI University’s curated year-round program. In 2015, she joined the Clinton Foundation as a postdoctoral fellow through The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. Prior to the this, she served as an Outreach and Selection Officer for Schwarzman Scholars at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China and at the U.S. Department of State, as Regional Director of Education USA in Melbourne, Australia.
Alyssa completed her Doctorate at the University of Melbourne, where she also worked as an International Student Advisor, Graduate Teaching Assistant, and Tutor in Residence at Newman College. She also holds a BA in History with a concentration in Indigenous Studies from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.