This panel shares the real meaning and experience of being resilient. Hearing about and seeing the devastating impacts of animal abuse and neglect day after day takes a terrible toll on teams. It can lead to high staff turnover, low staff morale and a broken team, and it requires a different type of leadership.

Improving psychological and emotional health and safety in the workplace reliably leads to better outcomes. Beth Gammie will introduce the concept of compassion resilience and teaches strategies for developing and maintaining your own compassion resilience while doing animal welfare work. Liza Sunley will talk about the idea of elastic hearts, and how to build resilient teams in animal sheltering. Amy Morris will build on these ideas, providing a case study that elaborates on trauma-informed and culturally-safe practices and how they relate to resilience at the organizational, team, and personal level.