Global discourse and local coping and hoping during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic touches every corner of the globe with unprecedented effects and implications. This special issue gathers knowledge, insight, experiences, and learnings about the profound impacts of the COVID-19 virus on communities from 12 countries. It presents six carefully selected manuscripts that reflect the ongoing conversation in our field about how the needs of the world's most vulnerable populations can be served by the field's values and paradigms. The reader will learn about collective symbolic coping, crisis management, barriers to and facilitators of supports and resources, mobilization of local networks of care, social toxicity and social possibility, coping strategies, affective impacts of confinement, the development of relationships between different social actors, the engagement of refugees and refugee-led organizations on the front lines of COVID-19, and even the buffering effects of gardening against the psychological impacts of isolation. Despite the grim reality of COVID-19, a thread of resilience, empowerment, and sense of community emerges loud and clear, and each manuscript is written with that same spirit and core tenet of community psychology that has always been our guiding light. During one of the most trying times of our lifetime, the need for a strong sense of community and mutual support will be a critical, if not determining, factor in how we continue to cope with this pandemic. It is our hope that this issue will inspire hope and reinforce the tools and competencies of community psychology to bring about positive enduring change within individual, family, peer, and community systems.