Building a healthier, more resilient Wisconsin is going to take all of us. That means people who have faced stress, trauma, risk factors like harmful substance use and other adversities aren’t in this effort alone.
Resilient Wisconsin is connecting and collaborating with community partners around the state—in health organizations, as well as state and local agencies and departments—to promote resilience-building ideas and efforts across a variety of interconnected priority areas. We use a continuum of primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention methods, from early upstream prevention efforts to intervention care and treatment. This is all done to identify and normalize effective help-seeking and resilience-building behaviors, address the interconnected causes and consequences of chronic, toxic stress, and help reduce the stigma experienced by those who live with or are affected by trauma in all its forms.
Pursuing health equity through upstream prevention
Everyone deserves the same opportunities for a healthy life. But our ability to thrive is often impacted by social determinants of health, the conditions in which people are born, live, work, and grow. These upstream factors influence health outcomes throughout our state.
According to the Healthiest Wisconsin 2020 Baseline and Health Disparities Report, racial and ethnic minorities, those with less income or education, people living with disabilities, members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) community, and people living in rural areas and Milwaukee County are among those populations that experience disparities in health risk behaviors and health outcomes in Wisconsin.
Their lives are connected by the root causes of Wisconsin’s health disparities and the underlying, often interconnected, causes of trauma and its related harms. That’s why Resilient Wisconsin is working to address mental and behavioral health challenges with early interventions that improve people’s social, economic, and environmental conditions. Because we believe upstream prevention can take us another step closer to reducing Wisconsin’s health inequities and preventing our toughest health challenges before they can take root.
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