Journey of Hope in Appalachia: Supporting Resilience in the Region's Youth

Rural youth have heightened exposure to adverse childhood experiences (ACES) such as poverty, social isolation, chronic hunger, and drug use in the home. These threats can lead to downstream problems with emotion regulation, substance abuse, and heightened vulnerability to chronic disease. Resilience is the capacity to adapt positively in the face of such disadvantage. Youth resilience interventions can buffer the negative effects of ACES. Unfortunately, rural schools and other youth-serving agencies often have inadequate capacity to provide such interventions. Thus, there is a critical need to develop cost-effective, sustainable, and culturally-relevant youth resilience interventions that can be delivered by trained personnel with dedicated time and resources. WVU, UK, and Save The Children have a long-term goal to establish a sustained community-engaged research partnership to promote resilience in Appalachian youth. This is a community-based participatory research (CBPR)-guided study being conducted for the purpose of developing a culturally relevant, intervention to promote Appalachian youth resilience. The intervention, called Journey of Hope in Appalachia (JOHA), has as it's starting point Save The Children's evidence-based Journey of Hope (JOH) program that targets youth experiencing acute stress from natural disasters and similar events. This program will be culturally adapted to promote resilience among Appalachian youth experiencing ACES. JOHA will incorporate positive aspects of Appalachian culture (e.g., storytelling, theater, music) and will be designed for sustainability and eventual dissemination by Save through the Appalachian Translational Research Network (ATRN) and other regional Networks.