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Professor Ioan Fazey, Director of the Centre for Environmental Change and Human Resilience (CECHR), Dundee University, delivers the second lecture in this Seminar Series. This presentation sought to examine issues around change, and how people respond to change using a case study from the Solomon Islands. The case study highlighted the need for improving our understanding of change and how desired change can be brought about. Towards the end, the presentation briefly touched on the kinds of things that might need to be considered if we are to facilitate transformative shifts that assist societies to work within the new normal of rapid and extensive change.

Julia Unwin CBE, Chief Executive of The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, delivers the third lecture in this Seminar Series. Julia discuses the great opportunity Scotland now has to do something positive about poverty and in particular, how people, communities, governments, businesses and housing providers can contribute towards a poverty-free Scotland.

Geoffrey Pleyers, FNRS Researcher & Associate Professor of Sociology, Universite de Louvain, Belgium delivers the fourth lecture in this Seminar Series. He addressed the following question: If we are discontent with the present order of things, particularly the overarching structures and mindset of neoliberal globalisation, how can we become effective agents of change when decisions that matter are as likely to be taken in Washington, New York, Beijing or Brussels as they are in London, Edinburgh or Govan?

Jane Ellen Stevens, founder and publisher of the ACEs Connection Network, which focuses on research about adverse childhood experiences and how people are implementing trauma-informed and resilience-building practices based on that research, delivers the sixth and final lecture of this Seminar Series. We are entering an age that might be the modern equivalent of the Renaissance, a new understanding about ourselves, why we behave the way we do, and how we can solve our most intractable problems, such as poverty, chronic disease, mental illness, and violence. Some people call this new understanding the “theory of everything”, a “unified science” of human development. This understanding will have a profound impact on our lives, and already is, in astounding ways. The five parts of this “theory of everything” are the CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE Study) and subsequent ACE surveys and studies (epidemiology); how toxic stress from ACEs affects the brain (neurobiology) and the body (biomedical consequences of toxic stress); how ACEs are passed from one generation to the next (epigenetic consequences of toxic stress); and resilience research, which takes advantage of the brain being plastic and the body wanting to heal. Based on this research, people, organizations and communities are putting into place trauma-informed and resilience-building practices that are already showing remarkable results, as long as those practices integrate an understanding of ACEs.

In this seminar, Ian shared some insights from the work of Bromley by Bow Health Partnership in East London including social prescribing, methods of co-production and work on integrating across a bio-medical approach and a community approach. He talked about a process of organisational change that they have embarked on which seeks to re-situate them as enablers of wellbeing rather than providers of health products.