Youth Creating Disaster Recovery and Resilience

Dr. Cox & Dr. Lori Peek (U of Colorado) received Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council funds for a cross-border research initiative learning from and with disaster affected youth.

Youth Creating Disaster Recovery & Resilience (YCDR¬2) was a cross-border initiative aimed at learning from and with disaster-affected youth 13 to 22 years of age in the communities of Joplin, Missouri in the United States, and Slave Lake, Calgary, and High River, Alberta, in Canada. Each of these communities experienced major disasters and were in the early stages of recovery when they were selected for this study. Working with local partners in each community, YCDR¬2 faculty and students engaged youth in experiential and arts-based workshops to explore their stories of recovery and resilience. The questions framing this research project focused on the people, places, spaces, and activities that helped or hindered the recovery process for youth and their peers.

Youth in the target communities were invited to participate in workshops using creative methods – those designed by the research team and those designed by the youth – to explore disaster recovery from their perspectives, and to consider how their perspectives and insights might contribute to the resilience of youth more generally and their community specifically. In each community the workshop processes resulted in different research outputs and stories. However, in each case, the stories stimulated and deepened youth’s discussion of their recovery experiences and enriched the team’s understanding of their perspectives on disasters and what aided or undermined their sense of well-being as they and their families worked through the recovery process.

In addition to traditional academic outputs such as peer reviewed papers and conference presentations, the research results in a series of animated videos produced by youth in Calgaray and High River Alberta which described the “heartbreak” and “nightmare” of the floods and the loss of memories, homes, and irreplaceable items but that also spoke of hope and the youths’ conscious choices to move forward despite the uncertainty of the path they were on.

The project also offered several methodological contributions and lessons learned about community and youth engagement and processes that simultaneously highlight capacities of youth, generate data, and provide novel options for knowledge mobilization in disaster research and practice. This article, therefore, describes the YCDR2 engagement and research process and elaborates on the opportunities and challenges associated with establishing youth-community-academic partnerships in post-disaster contexts.

YCDR¬2 inspired a later project, the Youth Designing Climate Resilience project also funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.