From Bushfires to Terrorism: How Communities Become Resilient

A team of researchers reflect on ways of building community resilience in response to extreme events, informed by their study of real-world incidents and information gathered through workshops with communities, academics, local organizations, emergency services, and local and national governments. Among their findings they identified seven main components essential to developing and sustaining a resilience community. One of the components is leadership, engagement, and shared responsibility, which highlights the importance of recognizing and promoting leadership at all levels and ensuring government organizations, especially those at the national level, don’t simply take over and leave others out of the decision-making process. Another component is mindset, collective thinking, openness to adapt and cultural change, which encourages creating opportunities for everyone to speak and be listened to and embracing new ideas and technologies. Other components include experience and shared memory, social ties and wider connections; integration, inclusivity, equity, and diversity; communications, social support, and coordination; and training and identifying local needs. The researchers also present four key recommendations for building strong, resourceful communities: they must have good communal spaces; building and sharing local knowledge should an ongoing priority; everyone should be heard and given a chance to collaborate; and good, open communication must be at the root of everything. Read the article at The Conversation.