Resilience Circle Curriculum
The Resilience Circle Network has produced a Seven-Session Facilitator’s Guide for your Resilience Circle. Some groups follow it step by step, while others pull out and use just a few pieces. We encourage you to use and adapt the Guide however it makes sense in your circumstances!
To receive a free electronic copy of the Facilitator’s Guide in Word or PDF, email us at Info@LocalCircles.org. To request a paper copy, please email us and consider making a $10 donation to help cover the printing and shipping costs. Donate here.
See also:
The Organizing Kit to get your Circle started
Resources for After the Curriculum
Facilitating a Resilience Circle and User’s Guide to the Curriculum
Facilitating a Resilience Circle: Facilitation Tips
Developing Participant Leadership
User’s Guide to the Curriculum
Overview of Sessions
Click the links below to download copies of individual sessions, or email us for a copy of the whole Guide. See below for a visual overview.
Session 1 – Our Resilience Circle
In this session, participants share their reasons for wanting to join a Resilience Circle and consider how dominant cultural messages keep us isolated and convince us to accept things as they are.
Session 2 – Changing the Story: A New Vision
The old economy created huge inequalities between the very wealthy and everyone else. Debt on both personal and societal levels has fueled unsustainable growth and overconsumption of the earth’s resources. In this session, we consider that our security depends not on a “recovery” to the old ways, but on imagining something different.
Session 3 – Changing the Story: Breaking Isolation
The old story about the economy tells us that we shouldn’t talk about our economic situation: it is either shamefully bad or embarrassingly good. This session creates a space for people to begin to break the habit of silence.
Session 4 – Strengthening Community: Real Wealth and Security
In Sessions 4 and 5 we consider the vital role our communities will play in building the new economy. In Session 4 we’ll consider new concepts of community wealth and security, and introduce the idea of mutual aid.
Session 5 – Strengthening Community: Mutual Aid
In this session, we will explore the proposition that ecological changes will deeply alter our economic lives – and that there is no going back to the economy of the past. This session also includes the exchanging of gifts and needs – a tangible experience that shows how much we can help each other.
Session 6 – Changing the Rules
In this session, we will explore the proposition that large corporations exert too much influence over the “rules” that govern our society. With a vision of a new economy (Sessions 2 and 3) and strengthened community ties (Sessions 4 and 5), we are equipped to engage in social action to rewrite these rules. We discuss what types of action the group is interested in.
Session 7 – What’s Next
Session 7 reviews what we have learned together and our vision for a new economy. We explore how we can build resilience together and what our next steps as a group will be.