Enhancing the Natural Resilience of Survival-Oriented Youth

Your Course Description

Your Competency Focus Area

Behavioral Intervention

Young people experiencing ongoing life challenges that result in unmet needs, homelessness, violence and other traumas often develop a survival orientation.
Many adults, especially those in positions of authority, inappropriately judge their behaviors as resistance, misbehavior, and unwillingness to engage.
You are in a position to teach young people new skills to enhance their natural resilience. You’ll gain practical methods for helping survival-oriented young people learn to adapt their resiliency skills for better results in school, work, and social settings.

Your Learning Objectives

Learn how survival skills are natural and adaptive responses to challenge, trauma, and unmet needs
Explore how a young person’s survival orientation can undermine skills and beliefs that promote long-term resilience
Consider how you can foster relationships, teach new skills and role model alternative belief systems that will enhance resilience
Recognize how adults may misinterpret youth survival thinking and behavior as resistance, misbehavior, pathology, and/or unwillingness to engage
Gain practical methods for helping survival-oriented young people learn to adapt their resiliency skills for better results in school, work, and social settings without compromising their identity

Your Course Details

Completion Certificate
Youth Worker Track
This training will count as 1.5 CE hours for most boards. Please contact your board directly with questions on submitting. Course details for CE submissions provided.

Your Trainer

David Wilmes has over 30 years of experience in the field of early intervention with youth whose behavior puts them at risk for being criminalized, pathologized or ostracized from the critical community-based resources that promote healthy youth development. Over that time period, he has authored numerous books, papers, curricula, and evaluation tools used by a wide range of professionals, parents, and other adults to help them increase their capacity to engage youth with challenging behaviors.

While Mr. Wilmes consults with and has worked with many treatment and correctional facilities, his most fundamental belief is that real growth and resilience primarily happens in the community and usually within the context of family, neighborhood, and school. Therefore, in the past decade he spends most of his professional energy working with schools, libraries, recreation centers, police departments, community activists/volunteers, tutoring and mentoring groups, and other community groups.

Mr. Wilmes received his undergraduate degree from Metro State University, and received his Master of Arts degree in Human Development from St. Mary’s University in Winona, MN.