Strengthening community resilience: a toolkit

While community resilience is said to have gained a lot of traction politically and given credence by disaster management professionals, this perception is not always shared by the individual members of communities. One solution to addressing the difficulty of individuals ‘conceptualising’ the benefits of resilience can be through the use of community workshops as a method of facilitating resilience awareness. Participatory workshops can be created to facilitate a “bottom-up” approach, with the aims of raising awareness and increasing the likelihood of resilient behaviours being adopted. Within the European project ‘DRIVER’ we have tested CART (Community Advancing Resilience Toolkit) as a means to increase resilience. This framework has an added benefit of bringing community members together regarding resilience, increasing their awareness of resilience and improving community cohesion through the exchange of ideas throughout the process. The methodology employs the use of a range of participatory methods including an assessment survey, key informant interviews, data collection framework, community conversations, neighbourhood infrastructure maps, community ecological maps, stakeholder analysis, SWOT analysis, capacity and vulnerability assessment. Eight workshops were held in Scotland pairing the CART toolkit’s framework with recent British Red Cross resilience thinking in order to raise the awareness of resilience among a broad range of rural and urban communities. The overall result is that members of communities became more aware of their own vulnerabilities and capabilities, both at the individual and collective level, encouraging action as to increase their resilience.