National Consortium for Societal Resilience [UK+] - Part 7

how can the national ambition be delivered locally - Day 2 Round tables discussion facilitated by Marcus Bowen

Notes from the session:

The message was clear, we don’t have to wait to be told what to do, we can get started now. Resilience is already happening we just need to to tune into it. And look to parallel this existing work with our formal resilience structures and emerging strategies and guidance.

LRFs can look to begin broadening their scopes already if they look within their partnerships and map out how to break through the silos based on an enhanced understanding of what partners are doing.

Marcus Oxley F.ISRM made my favourite point - emphasising the need to shift to wider more positive action. By shifting away from the risk narrative of extreme events - upside risk and opportunity can be capitalised on through local place making and strengthening resilience and competitive advantage. Build your resilience and stability to those events through growth, opportunity and development, security and prosperity. Resilience is a pathway to this. Shift the narrative to growth and investment. Stop thinking of risks that may or may not happen.

It was also noted by groups that there’s a need to recognise existing mechanisms and structures that work, and adapt to work to these. For example - Resilience groups from the pandemic - communities already doing resilience, raising the question of how you start listening - the process, mechanism and tools to listen and open lines of communication. An example being community planning and debriefing.

Comms with other groups and generations, examples: newsletters with real people writing and sharing their experiences. Young kids posters, cartoons, activities creative arts projects. Teens - tik tok. Social media. Leading to further questions like - How do you create the conditions to allow this to happen? Who and resources to do this? Invaluable comms but not people’s roles or capacity - how can we pivot to enable this through other channels?

Narrative and opportunity - how to thrive not just survive - meet communities where they are and give it relevancy not abstract perspective of top down risk management. Linking back nicely to the comments by Marcus Oxley F.ISRM

Reference was made to good schemes like national volunteer week, the big help out and September’s national preparedness month with- 30days30waysUK

Stakeholder engagement and communication skills, identified as the absolute key in all aspects of facilitating and delivering community resilience - from stakeholder mapping and analysis skills, to participatory engagement skills, effective communication skills all of which can seek to address the challenge of building sustainable meaningful relationships with communities.