Hope has been identified as a key psychosocial resource among family caregivers to manage and deal with the caregiver experience. The Living with Hope Program is a self-administered intervention that consists of watching an international award winning Living with Hope film and participating in a two week hope activity (“Stories of the Present”). The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of the Living with Hope Program on self-efficacy [General Self-Efficacy Scale], loss and grief [Non-Death Revised Grief Experience Inventory], hope [Herth Hope Index] and quality of life [Short-Form 12 version 2 (SF-12v2)] in rural women caring for persons with advanced cancer and to model potential mechanisms through which changes occurred.

Work that addresses the cumulative impacts of resource extraction on environment, community, and health is necessarily large in scope. This paper presents experiences from initiating research at this intersection and explores implications for the ambitious, integrative agenda of planetary health. The purpose is to outline origins, design features, and preliminary insights from our intersectoral and international project, based in Canada and titled the “Environment, Community, Health Observatory” (ECHO) Network. With a clear emphasis on rural, remote, and Indigenous communities, environments, and health, the ECHO Network is designed to answer the question: How can an Environment, Community, Health Observatory Network support the integrative tools and processes required to improve understanding and response to the cumulative health impacts of resource development? The Network is informed by four regional cases across Canada where we employ a framework and an approach grounded in observation, “taking notice for action”, and collective learning. Sharing insights from the foundational phase of this five-year project, we reflect on the hidden and obvious challenges of working across scales, sectors, and sites, and the overlap of generative and uncomfortable entanglements associated with health and resource development. Yet, although intersectoral work addressing the cumulative impacts of resource extraction presents uncertainty and unresolved tensions, ultimately we argue that it is worth staying with the trouble.

This paper focuses on the qualitative component of a study evaluating a hope intervention, entitled Living with Hope Program (LWHP), designed to foster hope in female caregivers of family members living with advanced cancer. The purpose of this research is to share, in the form of a story, the experiences of rural female caregivers caring for family members with advanced cancer, focusing on what fosters their hope. Hope is a psychosocial and spiritual resource that has been found to help family caregivers live through difficult transitions and challenges.

RRH: Rural and Remote Health. Published article number: 2561 - Hope of rural women caregivers of persons with advanced cancer: guilt, self-efficacy and mental health

RRH: Rural and Remote Health. Published article number: 6112 - Sustainability of a rural volunteer program (Nav-CARE): a case study