Community Resilience

We need communities that can recover, persist, and thrive in environments that constantly change.

But how do we create communities that are able to do this? As with all living things there are innumerable factors that influence a system’s capacity to do this.

All living systems have the capability to become resilient. Resilience is not a state; it is a process. It is a skill that grows through training and that fades when unused.

Resilience requires a community to be able to sense changes in its environment; to enable it to adjust and interact. With community awareness we develop a community’s ability to sense these changes and initiate the social processes necessary to respond to them. Beyond sensing, community resilience assumes an intelligent response to the environment. When we get better at this we are actually empowering ourselves, empowering the communities and organisations we care about.

When we develop the capacity to intelligently interact with the environment and observe the impact our behaviour has, we realise that we, collectively, have power. With power comes responsibility and at Collaborative Community we suggest that this makes collective consciousness a priority. We need to develop a collective moral and ethical outlook that helps us make decisions about our behaviour and the impact we like to have on our environment.