Recently Alice and Jesse were fortunate enough to attend the National Consortium of Societal Resilience (NCSR+) 2026 conference up in Manchester. The dual themes of the conference – on youth & family engagement, as well as water outages – prompted lots of interesting discussion in the conference hall with implications not just for Communities Prepared’s work but for the whole resilience sector.
One of the most refreshing parts of the event was hearing directly from young people in a panel facilitated by Dr. Martin Parham. The young people, ranging from school children to young youth workers, to the University’s own resilience officer, had a lot to say about resilience. Whilst many didn’t talk about resilience using the word “resilience” they absolutely understand what it means. For them, resilience was about coping with challenges, finding support from networks such as schools and youth clubs, and the need to experience some level of challenge as a precursor to building resilience.
These themes, especially around need to experience a challenge to build resilience to it, came up again in further conversations about Water Outage. During the discussions around water shortage on Jesse’s table, the fact that the UK enjoys a temperate climate with a moderate amount of rainfall was seen as a potential vulnerability. Our infrastructure and habits around water use have developed with this assumption that clean, fresh water will always be available through the tap and as such we lack resilience when water isn’t available. This reflection chimes with economist John Rapley’s arguments that, contrary to received wisdom, richer Western countries are less resilient to climate change shocks than poorer Global South countries because we have been insulated from challenges that would otherwise build resilience.
The young people on the panel also highlighted the need for engaging, interactive education around resilience that acknowledges that adults also have a lot to learn about resilience from our young people. They talked about the need for resilience engagement to be longer term and embedded into people’s lives, and for it to be clear what the benefits of resilience engagement is for young people.
Our own Jesse was invited to speak on a panel reflecting on our Families Prepared pilot programme involving online workshops for children and their adults on resilience. For us, household level resilience is a huge part of societal resilience; people will be able to help others in an emergency if they themselves are safe and well first. Children are important to engage in this work not just because they are part of our households, and not just because they are the future of resilience in a nebulous sense.
Children move through the world in a different way to adults and notice different things – they are much more likely to know if the fields where they play football on are flooded, or if the drains near where they knock about are blocked. Teaching children what to do with this information, and how they can work with their adults to report these smaller issues, has the potential to massively impact our ability to stave off larger problems that might arise if the smaller issues go unnoticed. It was clear from other examples highlighted at the conference too, such as Hampshire Young People’s Emergency Response (HYPER), who have been actively involved in responding to water outages, that children and young people are an important and untapped resource for societal resilience.
One of the unexpected themes that emerged from Jesse’s panel was a discussion about moss and biodiversity. When not working for Communities Prepared, Jesse teaches plant identification and ecology skills through Myco, a Manchester based nature project. As it happens someone in the audience had attended one of Jesse’s moss identification classes and asked them whether there were any lessons from the world of bryology that were relevant to resilience.
As you can imagine telling apart the 1000 different species of moss that the UK requires an attention to detail. Ecology is as much the art of making observations and “learning to look” for problems before they arise is an important skill for anyone involved in resilience. Moss also has more practical implications for resilience. Upland mosses, particularly Sphagnum species growing on our peatlands, have a hugely important role in water storage because they can absorb so much of the stuff. Healthy Sphagnum communities in peatlands mean our towns and villages below are much less likely to flood. On the other side, invasive moss species such as Campylopus introflexus have been known to increase the risk of moorland wildfires as they replace Sphagnum communities and dry out the land.
It’s always lovely to attend the NCSR+ conference and having the opportunity to get out of the everyday and learn together, discuss issues, and challenge each other is so important. Our main takeaway has been to pay attention to the small things which can punch above their weight – whether that’s young people who might otherwise be dismissed, the humble moss, or resilience practitioners – small but mighty things have an important role to play!