Defining and understanding resilience

Community resilience is a way of thinking about resilience at the level of the group or the community. If you like, it’s about understanding resilience as an ecology rather than as about an individual attribute or quality or feature. So when we think about community resilience, there are really three key things that we need to be concerned with. The first is what kind of resources are available within a community that people can access in times of crisis or during adversity or when they’re experiencing challenges. But having resources available in and of itself is not sufficient for community resilience to thrive.

People also have to be able to access those resources so it’s great if you have resources, but if you can’t access them, they’re not going to be much good to you. Even if you have resources and you can access them as a community, you also have to know how to navigate those resources, how to make them work for you. That means distributing resources, the ability to access those resources, and the ability to navigate them to help you meet their needs either at an individual or in a group or community level.

All three of those elements must really be working well together as part of a broader ecology of community resilience for us to think about communities being strong and well in terms of coping with challenge and adversity.