Norman E. Taylor, Editor-in-Chief*
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
Fred Rogers
But what if the helpers aren’t there? The past few years have shown us that this has now become much, much more than a rhetorical question.
In communities around the world, citizens have had to learn to adapt to staffing shortages in some of the most heretofore reliable and presumptively available essential services. We have seen emergency rooms and operating rooms close their doors to intake. We have seen school classrooms literally closed for business. We have seen correctional facilities at a breaking point. We have seen the publicly funded and community-based services that attend to the needs of our most marginalized people overwhelmed and besieged, as unhoused and complex-needs populations continue to grow on our streets and in our parks. And we have watched as police, fire, and emergency medical resources are both strained and maligned, sometimes unable to respond sufficiently to planned events, and wholly overwhelmed by unplanned incidents of high consequence.
For most of us, all of this has largely been experienced as inconvenience, with perhaps yet unmeasured impacts on our sense of security and social stability. However, make no mistake. For those professionals who dedicate their careers to the human services, these unrelenting conditions have been experienced as life-altering, disorienting, anxiety-producing, and traumatic. All of these recent conditions pile onto the emotional strain and compassion fatigue that already accompany many of these vital lines of work.
About two years into the overlapping issues of 2020 and 2021, with some glimmers of hope beginning to point towards recovery for society in general, it was apparent to us at the Journal of Community Safety and Well-Being that helping the helpers was becoming an urgent imperative. The world was delivering a new baseline upon which such help must be conceived and understood. What we may have thought we knew in 2019, and what programming had already been achieved, must now make way for new knowledge, reset possibilities, and scaled-up wellness practices to meet the still-emerging collateral damage from these unprecedented times. When we floated this observation with our friends at Deloitte, they agreed and generously stepped up to support this special wellness issue, dedicated to all CSWB professionals who have taken the rest of us through the early storms of a new decade.
Please see the opening Editorial from Lauren Jackson and Michelle Theroux, representing Deloitte, our Supplement Sponsor, and the Editorial from Linna Tam-Seto and Jeff Thompson, our two guest editors who have curated an outstanding and diverse selection of papers. These two editorials will set the stage for your journey through the featured papers, contributed by an impressive collection of global authors.
We thank our guest editors for their tireless work in a short space of time. We thank all of the contributing authors for their patience, flexibility, and cooperation throughout all stages of this production. We extend similar thanks to the wide array of peer reviewers for their work in supporting these aims, while ensuring high standards of editorial quality in all of the papers.
Finally, the combined special issue team looks forward to the upcoming Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) Canadian Policing Wellness Check conference, scheduled for March 6–8 in Ottawa. See cacp.ca for details, and we encourage everyone working across CSWB sectors to register and get involved in this event. This special issue of the journal has helped to shape an “updating the evidence” panel session as a flagship component of that conference program.
The author has continuing business interests that include providing advisory services to communities, police services and related human service agencies.
*Community Safety Knowledge Alliance, Saskatoon, SK, Canada..
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Journal of CSWB, VOLUME 8, NUMBER Suppl 1, February 2023