Building Forward: Charting a Path to Resilience

Reflections on the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty

Every year on October 17th, the United Nations encourages the world to pause and reflect on the ongoing reality of poverty across the globe. This year, the theme for the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty is “Building Forward Together: Ending Persistent Poverty, Respecting all People and our Planet”.

What does it mean to “build forward”? We can think of building forward as a counterpoint to building back. The ability to build back is the essence of resilience; in the face of crisis, we do not break under the strain, but persist and recover. We are able to build back and regain what was lost.

But for many people, what was lost wasn’t working for them in the first place. Food insecurity, homelessness, precarious work, isolation and debt were all endemic in the world that Covid entered. In fact, it was many of these aspects of that pre-Covid world that left us highly vulnerable to the ravages of a pandemic.

Building forward challenges us to consider a new, different, better state. Building forward is an important prospect to consider as we continue to grapple with the realities of Covid. When this pandemic is eventually behind us, is it sufficient to merely return to the kind of society we knew before?

Covid has revealed the fault-lines in our economic, social and political systems. Highly polarized worldviews that exploit divisions between people on the basis of their ethnicity, gender identity, or economic status have not served us well. The glorification of competition that pits us against each other has not served us well. The drive to gain and cling to power at all costs has not served us well. The ideology of individualism and independence at the expense of our shared responsibility to community has not served us well.

Underlying this is the breakdown in trust – in our leaders, in our institutions, in our media, in scientific knowledge, and in each other. This truly has not served us well. So we have buckled under the strain of a crisis no one imagined, unable to come together at the precise moment history required it of us.

Research on resilience gives us insight into what truly resilient systems (and societies) look like. Such systems are highly diverse and cooperative, with shared power and leadership. And at the root of those properties is the critical element of trust. If we have the courage, we might consider such a world and strive to build forward toward it.

Building forward requires vision and courage. There is no map that shows us the way. But if we simply settle for building back what was lost with all its fissures and cracks, we are destined to once again buckle under the strain of the next great crisis. Instead, if we set our sights on a different star, it might guide us to a different destination. This might require us to take turns and follow directions that seem uncomfortable, unfamiliar, or counter-intuitive. Change and growth usually do. But in the end embracing that risk is the only way to build true resilience.

This reflection appears in the Fall 2021 edition of Spero, newsletter of the Canadian Poverty Institute.