Distinguishing Flourishing from Distressed Communities: Vulnerability, Resilience and a Systemic Framework to Facilitate Well-Being

Abstract

In this chapter we expand the conceptualization of community well-being, the indicators used to measure it, and suggested fresh and more systemically comprehensive considerations for research and practice in distressed and flourishing communities. Past research has distinguished between distressed and flourishing communities in terms of quality-of-life (QOL) indicators: distressed communities tend to focus on basic needs of community residents (e.g., food, shelter, crime, unemployment, and security measures); flourishing communities on basic needs plus growth needs (e.g., sports, recreation, arts and culture, innovations, and leisure). We revisited the concept of flourishing in QOL studies and discussed concepts such as human flourishing, self-determination, psychological well-being, flow and engagement, and purpose and meaning in life. We then discussed concepts of community vulnerability and resilience and advanced our own definition of flourishing versus distressed communities. A flourishing community is a recognizable assembly of people with shared values, cooperating to ensure clear evidence of positive physical, economic, environmental, and social well-being, which empower constituent members in their efforts to affect further prosocial outcomes for stakeholders of the community. A distressed community is essentially the converse. We then described a systemic framework that captures the conditions within that interact to produce community well-being. These conditions involve marketing practices, consumption/demand, catalytic institutions (government, business, and NGOs), characteristics of the marketplace or citizen-stakeholders of it (location/access, income/wealth capital, social/cultural capital, situational commonalities, transparency/accountability, motivation, and market literacy/access), and macro factors (geo/environment, population, political/legal, economic, social/cultural, education, administration, infrastructure, and technology).