community resilience – Communities Prepared

Guest Blog: How the podcast “Screw This, Let’s try something else” is sharing stories of what’s possible

Posted on 28th April 202628th April 2026 by Communities Prepared Team

My name is Matt Golding – and I’m a filmmaker and more recently a podcaster.

In my latest project, “Screw This, Let’s try something else”, I and friend / fellow storyteller Maryam Pasha tour the UK visiting just some of the hundreds of ordinary communities that are doing something extraordinary – and demonstrating that new, more affordable, equitable and sustainable ways to live well are possible.

This is part of a wider project I’m running called ANTIDOTE, which is based on the idea that the stories we need right now are not deeper explorations of the many problems we face, but examples of people like us, getting together and showing what we can do about them.

The kind of stories we tell include:

1: Ambition Lawrence Weston:
- A community in Bristol who became so fed up of being left behind by government they decided to do something about it – knocked on 3,500 doors and asked 3 simple questions:
  - What’s good about living in Lawrence Weston?
  - What’s not so good?
  - What would you like to change?

– They discovered the major frustration was that they were living in a food desert – so they did something ingenious (listen to the podcast for more) and managed to get a supermarket to move to the area, bringing food prices down and proving they could turn ideas into reality.

They then went on to re-write their local housing policy, making it illegal to build homes with gas boilers, without electric car charging points, and without top notch insulation.

As if this wasn’t enough, they subsequently built the biggest wind turbine in England, which is 100% community owned and nets them £100k a year to keep change going in their community.

2: CIVIC SQUARE:
- A group in the urban heart of Birmingham, one of the most diverse neighbourhoods in the UK, have come together to design a neighbourhood fit for the actual future we face – tackling retrofit, food growing, energy production and community organising in incredibly smart and wise ways.

Having hit hurdles along the way (listen to episode 4 of our podcast) they finally realised the value of land ownership in the power of their plans and after much perseverance took ownership of the freehold of an old industrial site in 2025, which will now be developed into a new neighbourhood hub – tackling many of the issues neighborhoods in the UK face and offering a blueprint for others.

3: CARRICK GREENGROCERS:

Carrick Fergus in Northern Ireland, like most of the places in our series, was fed up with being neglected. A small team asked their fellow residents what they wanted to change, and in this case supermarkets were the problem (having decimated the high street and left people resentful of paying for what they saw as overpriced, bland and plastic wrapped food).

They crowd funded a greengrocer which stocks local regeneratively grown food from a market garden 10 minutes from the shop, and they’re now advising on Northern Irish food policy to see how this type of model could expand to increase food resilience and reconnect people to local food and farming.

All of these examples prove what’s possible when we reimagine the key things we all depend on, together.

In episode 6, the final part of this first series, we’re joined by friend (and author of the book Citizens) Jon Alexander to draw out the key learnings of communities across the country – to help more of us join in. These include:

1: Find the others: Start small – most community projects that achieve big change only start with 8 – 12 core people. Initially just start with 1 or 2 others who share your passion!
2: ..but ask everyone: …and then they ask the whole community what they want (and the pattern here is strong – the more who’re asked, the easier it is to find what it is the community really wants, and therefore will support)
3: Agree a vision and values: It’s easier to work together if you’ve all agreed clearly what you’re working towards, and how you are doing it
4: And trust yourself: …trust your collective instincts. Our systems are so broken, there is no book that will tell you the way forward for where you are. But how change needs to work in your local area is probably something you can work out best together.

Take a listen – and I hope it inspires you.

If so – we’ve created a postcode search tool to help you find 5 examples of collective action within 5 miles of your house. Check it out here: https://www.antidotelive.studio/near-you

Together we can create big meaningful change on the things we all need – food, energy, housing, democracy that actually works. These stories prove this isn’t only possible, it’s already happening all around us.

To find out more visit us here:

Podcast: SCREW THIS, LET’S TRY SOMETHING ELSE:

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/screw-this-lets-try-something-else/id1863391095

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Bornsbddwi4xZYQLoAm6b?si=d500b7fbf3924eb6

ANTIDOTE project website: https://www.antidotelive.studio/

ANTIDOTE Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/antidotelive/

ANTIDOTE TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@antidote_live

ANTIDOTE Substack: https://mattgolding.substack.com/

Do you have a guest blog you’d like to share on Communities Prepared? Be sure to reach out to us at communitiesprepared@groundwork.org.uk, or send us a message here.

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Communities Prepared at the NCSR 2026 Conference

Posted on 2nd April 20262nd April 2026 by Communities Prepared Team

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!

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Guest Blog: Sensing Climate: Disability & Climate Resilience

Posted on 30th October 20252nd April 2026 by Communities Prepared Team

In this month’s guest blog, Dr Sarah Bell shines the light on an essential topic, the interface of climate resilience and disability. Dr Bell is a senior lecturer in Health Geography at the European Centre for Environment and Human Health (ECEHH). Since 2019, Dr Bell has been co-designing an interdisciplinary research programme to explore opportunities to highlight disability rights and knowledge in climate adaptation scholarship, academia and practice.

Climate change poses significant risks to human life and livelihoods in ways that are compounding and creating new forms of social inequality. Disabled people – including 16% of the global population and 24% of the UK population – are particularly at risk of adverse climate impacts. Globally, disabled people are 2-4 times more likely to die or be injured in heatwaves, hurricanes and floods.

In part, these risks are due to the damaging impacts of extreme weather events on existing health conditions. In part, they are due to the cumulative influence of austerity and declining welfare support, which have undermined people’s capacity to cope in the current climate, let alone prepare for future risks. But these risks are exacerbated further by eco-ableism; whereby some of the actions promoted to address the climate emergency are creating new challenges for disabled people.

When not framed out of discussions about climate change, disabled people are often framed solely as one of several ‘climate vulnerable’ groups, with little reflection on the social, political and economic systems that create vulnerability. This is not to say that vulnerability does not exist. It does. But vulnerability is created by our society, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

The single story of vulnerability also overlooks the rich knowledge and skills of disabled people within climate action. Climate change is disabling; it is making our world more uncertain, more unpredictable, more harmful. Yet the people who know what it means to navigate a disabling world – disabled people – are so often left out of this work.

Without denying the existence of vulnerability, this single story of ‘disability as vulnerability’ flattens a rich diversity of lived experience and closes down collaborative opportunities to imagine climate-resilient and socially-just worlds.

Sensing Climate is a five-year research project, led by the University of Exeter, and funded by UK Research and Innovation and the Leverhulme Trust. It foregrounds the role and importance of disability knowledges in developing adaptive responses to increasingly unpredictable and challenging environments.

It is a collaborative programme of interdisciplinary research, encompassing international, UK national law and policy reviews and in-depth city case studies in Bristol and Glasgow (UK) and Dublin (Ireland). It includes qualitative and arts-based research activities across the three case study cities as well as policy roundtables at city and national levels.

A recurrent issue being shared by disabled participants across the study is a concern about gaps in emergency preparedness and resilience planning with and for disabled people. Advice for how to prepare for extreme weather events often places responsibility on individuals to do so, or suggests that neighbours will be on hand to provide support in an emergency. Yet, as discussed by our participants, many disabled people cannot afford to create a grab bag or gather emergency supplies, and do not have a neighbour they could turn to for help in an emergency, nor a personal assistant or caregiver who would be on hand at home to help. Many had a sense that no-one would even know they were there, let alone how to support them safely in the event of a storm or flood.

As commented by one participant:

“To deal with the complexity and difficulty of human life we need to serve those who need it most first… You need to think about people who are on machines to keep them alive all the time which means you have to be prepared for that which means you have to know how many people, roughly where they are, how quickly you can get all the support in place and you need to test it regularly to make sure it’s all actually there. Like, you don’t send a fire engine out not having tested it and giving it an MOT and all that kind of thing, do you?”

Underlying many of the concerns raised, has been a sense that the lives of disabled people are not seen as important. For example, one participant explained:

“There’s something about how people view disabled people’s lives, and their value and their worth. And how in “natural disasters”, or in floods, or in heatwaves… and cold snaps over winter … it’s normally disabled and elderly people that will die in those situations. And people are like ‘oh, well you know, that was going to happen anyway, they’re disabled, and they’re old’. I feel like there’s that kind of attitude generally in society, of if a disabled person or if an elderly person dies it doesn’t really matter as much as if a younger person or a non-disabled person died… it feels like in terms of the climate emergency it’s just another thing where disabled people are not considered as valuable, full human beings”

Within the project, we have been working closely with Dr Emma Geen (Climate and Disability Programme Associate to the Bristol Climate & Nature Partnership’s Community Climate Action (CCA) project) to develop a series of guidance notes, including for example:

Our recently launched ‘Crip Up Climate Conversations’ guidance series, which aims to broaden the ways in which disabled people are framed within (or framed out of) climate action, and to support people in creating respectful, safe and inclusive opportunities for disabled communities to shape this work.

Resources for local authorities and third sector organisations working on different dimensions of climate action to understand disability priorities in the areas of emergency preparedness, transport, housing, energy, green jobs, nature, food and waste, along with two cross-cutting resources around co-production and inclusive engagement. These will be launched in Spring 2026.

If you would like to find out more about the project, the resources or the specific work around emergency preparedness and community resilience, do get in touch with the project lead, Sarah Bell (sarah.bell@exeter.ac.uk).

About the Author
Dr Sarah Bell is a Senior Lecturer in Health Geography at the European Centre for Environment and Human Health (ECEHH), part of Exeter University. Her research interests include geographies of health and wellbeing, disability-inclusive climate action and more-than-human therapeutic landscape experiences.

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New Funding Secured: Communities Prepared Gets Five More Years Thanks to The National Lottery Community Fund

Posted on 15th July 202415th July 2024 by Erez Molinas

Communities Prepared team meets in-person in Bristol, UK

In late May we were delighted to hear that our application to The National Lottery Community Fund for a further five years of funding was successful!

We are hugely grateful for the Fund’s continued support, and the opportunity that this gives us to both continue the work we’re already doing to grow community resilience across England and to explore how we can extend our offer and reach further. You can imagine how hard it’s been for us to keep the news quiet during the period of sensitivity in the run up to the recent General Election! With a new government now in position, we’re pleased to be able to share our news far and wide, and to start planning in earnest for the next phase of Communities Prepared which will kick off next month.

Thanks to this funding, our programme of live online training sessions and workshops will continue after a brief pause this summer to allow us to review our content and plan ahead for the autumn (watch this space for autumn dates coming soon), with plenty of self-led learning still available on our website too. Our training offer will continue to cover our existing topics such as flooding, snow, heatwaves, community emergency planning and coordinator training. We are also planning to expand this further, taking on board feedback from communities and partners we’ve worked with to date – including mini modules focused on different types of flooding, storm volunteer training and a workshop for primary schools.

The funding will also enable us to develop our regional community training and support plans through our national network of Groundwork Trusts and to ensure that our offer is accessible as possible to all those who need it.

Contact us if you want to work with us, know someone we can work with, or have suggestions!

We’re currently looking for partners to help us turn these plans into reality, so if you would like to work with us to grow community resilience in your area, please get in touch.

Beyond this, we’ll also continue to work with other organisations across the community resilience sector to convene and collaborate, ensuring that we all use our limited resources as effectively as possible. With a new Labour government under Sir Kier Starmer we look forward to seeing the momentum around whole of society resilience continue to build and are pleased to have the long term security in our own work to enable us to follow and be part of these developments.

If you have any suggestions for how we should focus our efforts over the next five years we’re always happy to hear them via our contact page or emailing to communitiesprepared@groundwork.org.uk. We’re excited about what the future holds for us and look forward to continuing to work with you all.

Hannah Baker

Communities Prepared Programme Manager

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Insights from the BRIC Project Closing Conference – March 2023, Plymouth

Posted on 3rd April 20233rd August 2023 by Emily Roach Osborne

Project Support Officer Emily Roach Osborne reflects on the approach and learnings of the BRIC project in engaging communities and effectively, collaboratively improving climate resilience in communities.

Communities Prepared attended the Social Innovation for Climate Resilience conference in Plymouth on Wednesday 15^th of March. This conclusion of the two-year Building Resilience in Communities project across the UK and France showcased the eight different programmes developed in this time, all of which sought to engage with local communities in preparing for, managing, and recovering from flooding. We were grateful to be able to attend and exhibit at what was a very interesting, informative and diverse event, and for our Programme Manager Hannah Baker to both contribute a keynote speech on the Communities Prepared programme and sit as part of a panel discussing the challenges, surprises and insights encountered when engaging communities. In her keynote speech, Hannah took the opportunity to introduce attendees to Communities Prepared and our approach, sharing examples of where and how we’ve been working to date. Hannah set out some of our learnings from engaging communities and professionals across England, and how we’re applying these to our future plans.

Communities Prepared *Programme Manager Hannah Baker giving a keynote speech on Communities Prepared*

One of the biggest insights from the conference was hearing of the methods, challenges and approaches to engaging communities across the programme given frustrations with communication, information and funding, as well as complex and varying vulnerabilities, and broader contexts of the COVID pandemic, the cost of living crisis and climate change. How do we understand and meet the needs of the communities in a way that empowers them given these factors? How can we be of meaningful use to them?

Many of the projects tackled this through creating space for listening. Be that through facilitated forums between the public and project stakeholders such as local councils, services and businesses or through storytelling, mapping and embodied walking exercises in which people shared their experiences, or creative, visualising activities. Opportunities for communities to meet and contribute to collective memory with photography projects through Thames 21’s Canvey Island pilot and to have their emotions heard (Authie Valley, France), as well as celebrate their communities in local festivals in (Plymouth, UK) and Aulne Valley, France) were powerful examples of what is meaningful to communities who have experienced flooding and are looking to heal and strengthen their resilience.

Hannah and Emily observing a presentation given in French. The conference was delivered in both English and French, with live translation throughout the day. Image courtesy of Amy Stanford Photography

To this end, intersectionality was also discussed by Samuel Rufat of Institut Universitaire de France as a means of effectively capturing and meeting the complexity of needs within communities and demonstrates how new frameworks of understanding can inform community resilience. New technologies were also discussed by Ogoxe, a company based in France that seeks to provide reliable, accessible, free information on weather and related emergency risks, demonstrating the scope and potential of modern technology in democratising information in order to empower the public, and how funding can make this possible.

This conference was an opportunity to consider what it means to meaningfully engage a community in a way that builds trust and respects the cost of volunteering for people within such communities during times of crisis. Some useful publications from the conference are listed below with weblinks for further insight into emergency planning, community engagement and crisis recovery. It was raised that projects like BRIC ideally need longer to achieve their objectives, and for this reason it is commendable what BRIC has achieved and learned given the impact of broader social issues like the COVID-19 pandemic and cost of living crisis. Whilst the broader project is now coming to a close, both the website and some of the pilots will stay active. Visit the BRIC website and explore the pilot sites of the project to learn more about their collaborative approach to engagement.

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Flood Expo 2022

Posted on 18th August 20223rd August 2023 by Communities Prepared Team

This September we’re excited to again be taking part in the Flood Expo. Held at NEC Birmingham from 14^th-15^th September, this is Europe’s leading Flood Management event; providing the public with an opportunity to interact with flood professionals, local authorities and communities all in one place, for free. We look forward to attending and engaging with the flood sector and wider public, as well as enhancing our knowledge and understanding of the latest technologies, services and strategies available to help predict, prevent and manage flooding.

What is most special for us about Flood Expo 2022 is the brand new -and first of its kind- Community Flood Zone. This initiative has been developed by Communities Prepared and other flood specialists with the explicit aim of centring the public in the discussion around flooding. It is a space to come with your questions, concerns and needs and help to steer the priorities of the flood services sector and the wider conversation around flooding. The Community Flood Zone will also include :

Mary Dhonau – answering questions and giving practical flood preparation advice using the flood mobile: a ‘flood house on wheels’ that demonstrates various property-level adaptations that can reduce the impact of flooding in your homes and business buildings. Have a look at her website ahead of the Expo.
Flood Re – answering questions and offering advice regarding affordable insurance options and the Build Back Better scheme for those who experience flooding in their homes. Have a look at their website ahead of the Expo.

Attending from our team is Richard Hood, Senior Project Officer with Communities Prepared. Richard is part of the programme’s delivery team, focusing on community development and training. He brings with him specialist knowledge in flood resilience and management, water rescue operations, incident management and operational procedures. He will be available to discuss your concerns and receive your questions on our Community Flood Zone stand throughout the Expo. Beyond this, insight and learning will be high on the agenda with a seminar programme packed with expert-led sessions, panels and demonstrations covering topics from flood reduction to property level flood protection, and a presentation from ITV Meteorologist and trusted voice on climate change, Laura Tobin. Richard will be taking part in a panel discussion as part of the seminar programme too; more details on this to follow.

If you or your community have been affected by flooding, we urge you come to and speak with us at the Community Flood Zone. Your contribution to the conversation is vitally important, and will enable us to continue to develop this initiative beyond this year. The entire Expo is free to attend and both welcomes and depends upon the engagement with the public, so please join us!

Follow the link to the Flood Expo website to sign up for free and see what’s in store, and please share the event with anyone you feel would benefit from it. The venue is wheelchair accessible, easily accessible by train or car and has extensive car parking facilities that you can pre-book. Feel free to contact us with any questions ahead of the event.

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Somerset celebrates emergency volunteers

Posted on 7th June 202128th April 2022 by Communities Prepared Team

To continue Volunteers’ Week celebrations, registration has opened for the 4^th annual Somerset Resilience event, with residents invited to sign up to a month of free, interactive online training with emergency incident responders and volunteer organisations. Volunteers’ Week celebrates the contribution volunteers make, recognising the huge positive impact they have, with many of these volunteers key to their community’s emergency preparedness.

The ‘Somerset Prepared’ partnership is organising the resilience event which will run across October. Throughout the month, there will live online talks, videos, toolkits and training which aims to help communities become better prepared for emergency situations, as well as looking at wider preparedness measures that anyone can take.

Anyone who registers will receive a goody bag and information pack, and weekly emails throughout October, signposting to pre-recorded videos and written toolkits on a variety of subjects.

Somerset Prepared co-chair and Environment Agency organiser Hannah Ovett said: “Interactive events like this are an excellent way to raise awareness with local communities and individuals and help them to take vital steps in preparing for an incident, which could ultimately save lives.

“The month’s sessions will cover a range of subjects from how to use Natural Flood Management to Food Resilience and First Aid, and will also feature case studies from communities who have written and used emergency plans during incidents.”

“The community chat sessions will be a great opportunity for groups to hear from each other, share their experiences and get together in a safe, online environment, whilst the training workshops are scheduled to help with topics we are consistently seeing raised by communities, including recruiting volunteers, how to assess risk and GDPR.”

Sessions will be led by a range of organisations including the Environment Agency, South West Ambulance Service Trust, Communities Prepared, Devon and Somerset Fire and Rescue Service, Somerset Rotary, Somerset Civil Contingencies Unit, Spark Somerset, and Community Council for Somerset.

To attend this free event, residents can register their interest on the Somerset Prepared website www.somersetprepared.org.uk.

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From floods to pandemics: adapting to COVID-19

Posted on 25th June 202029th June 2020 by Communities Prepared Team

Andrew Turner is the Emergency Officer for Sixpenny Handley and Pentridge Parish Council in Dorset, whose role until COVID-19 largely covered groundwater flooding. Here, he discusses how he and his team of community volunteers adapted to the impact of COVID-19.

Can you explain some of the steps you took to adapt to COVID-19?

I started to review our Community Emergency Plan in February 2020 as more COVID 19 outbreaks were occurring. At this point, I had planned out the workings of our Flu Friends support group but had no community volunteers. In early March I put posters up around the village with my contact details asking for volunteers. Within a week I had 18 and by the time the lockdown occurred I had over 80. I divided the Parish into areas based on the number of houses and allocated a team to each with a Leader and Deputy. I also established a Phone Buddy team, made up of people in the community with appropriate skills or those who wanted to be involved but couldn’t as they had to self-isolate.

We sent letters to residents, explaining how to order food from our local shops and arranging for prescriptions to be collected. This was issued along with a newsletter explaining what we were doing and helping keep people informed. We’ve kept the newsletters going and each one has had a different angle, including good news stories and reminders about key safety aspects.

Everything we have established through COVID-19 needs to be maintained so that we have a package ready should it be needed again.

How did you find the process of adapting?

It was very quick to get the group up and running because I had done the groundwork with the plan and received a lot of community volunteers willing to support those having to isolate. Our Dorset Councillor was and is very supportive and I have a call each week with the Parish Council to keep them up to date. However, making decisions in the beginning, based on what I felt was the right thing to do, was very difficult; no county wide communication loop had been established and I did feel very isolated as a result.

Within the team I have maintained weekly calls with the Team Leads, Phone Buddies and Reserve volunteers. This ensures we have a chain of command and consistent messaging as well as the ability to feed back. I gather stats from each team every week and collate these to establish how much ‘work’ we are undertaking. Initially, this was to know whether any team was overloaded, and is broken down in terms of shopping, prescriptions and phone calls. As we gathered data, I have been able to build a profile and can now see we have a steady volume of trips and calls that is sustainable within the team.

How did you use social media and other communication tools during the crisis response?

I set up a Facebook page and a group in the NextDoor app to push information out – either updates on our group’s activities or output from the GOV.UK daily update. This information also gets uploaded onto our community website, so those not using Facebook or NextDoor can still access it. I have also set up a free Microsoft Teams area where all our documents are stored.

I used the Communities Prepared website for information and guidance in setting the support team up and continue to check back for other resources to utilise.

Have there been any key learnings from this experience that you’ll take forward?

Everything we have established through COVID-19 needs to be maintained so that we have a package ready should it be needed again. I made use of Communities Prepared training/briefing packs to ensure we were covering the right scope at a realistic level and to inform community volunteers joining the team. Engagement within the community has been key to the success of the plan and so we need to ensure we maintain this going forward. We need to work with Dorset Council to ensure we are better integrated.

Will you maintain engagement with the new volunteers you’ve acquired through the pandemic? If so, how do you see them playing a role in future emergencies?

Yes, when we’re able to meet, I want to workshop the whole experience to gather everyone’s thoughts and ensure we track what we did but also what could have been done better. With this information I will update the Pandemic Flu plan for future use. I also want to keep everyone registered so that I can contact them periodically and look at how we can extend other areas of our overall emergency plan if needed.

What stage is your community at now? Are you looking at crisis recovery?

We are continuing our support model and expect to align this with the overall Government recommendations.

As lockdown restrictions ease, communities will be starting to look at ways to rebuild and strengthen. Our free upcoming webinar takes a practical look at how community volunteer groups & Town & Parish Councils can assist with crisis recovery. Book here.

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Building resilience in rural communities

Posted on 8th June 202015th July 2020 by Communities Prepared Team

Communities Prepared (a Groundwork South programme) and Action with Communities in Rural England (ACRE) have published a new guide to help rural communities become more resilient in the face of emergencies.

Drawing on the experience of local rural charities and existing initiatives, the guide provides practical tips for rural residents to prepare for, and help each other, at times of crisis. It shows how volunteer groups can be set up to develop emergency plans that identify local risks, and maps out the resources and support that can be mobilised should situations arise that threaten the health, wellbeing and livelihoods of people in the local area.

A tractor clears snow from a roadway after the Beast From The East Winter Storm.

Download the guide here

Financial backing for the guide has been primarily provided by The Prince’s Countryside Fund, with additional support from The National Lottery Community Fund.

Zoey Ayling, Programme Manager for Communities Prepared said: “As the outbreak of Covid-19 has demonstrated, unexpected events can and do happen, threatening the way of life we have become accustomed to. Sometimes the impact on individuals and the services that support them can be severe, with recovery taking months, if not years. That’s why we created this guide to help communities plan ahead, offering information and practical guidance on how to identify risk, understand the key roles during an emergency and pull together to build long term resilience.”

The guide features stories where rural communities took a proactive approach to anticipating and responding to emergency situations. These include the delivery of hot meals to residents in Caddington, Bedfordshire, who were left without electricity and gas after heavy snowfall, and community and voluntary organisations that joined together to help residents and businesses recover following the extensive flood damage caused by Storm Desmond in 2015.

David Emerson, ACRE’s Chair said: “We are delighted to publish this guidance with Communities Prepared, which builds on the ACRE Network’s rich heritage of helping rural communities to help themselves – sometimes at the most difficult of times – by making the most of their local knowledge, capacity and resources. In contrast to their urban counterparts, rural communities are not well served by public infrastructure and services so initiatives led by volunteers can make a tremendous difference to the wellbeing, livelihoods and security of everyone locally. This way of working has been demonstrated brilliantly in the context of Coronavirus – when we are seeing rural communities across England taking a lead on local responses to the pandemic, from good neighbour schemes to village halls being used to distribute food parcels.”

Building community resilience to challenges also has many other benefits beyond the emergencies. Examples in the guide show how this can also bring about environmental improvements, foster new community networks, and underpin social cohesion.

A close up of a person’s gloved hand picking up a plastic bottle from leaves on the ground.

This essential guide will make it possible for everyone in the countryside to recognise the risks to their community, understand what can be done to prepare for them, and be familiar with the emergency actions that can be taken in conjunction with other agencies should the worst happen.

Download the guide here

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