How to Build Community Resilience

How resilient is your community? Together, can you rise to the challenges that the future will bring? Or is there fragility within the systems that surround you that may make future challenges harder to overcome? 

When you think about resilience, you may well think first of all of your own personal resilience and, perhaps secondly, about household resilience. But community resilience is something that should not be overlooked. 

Sadly, in this day and age, communities are more fractured and disparate than they often were in the past. 

Neighbors often do not even know neighbors, and it is common for those who live just feet away from one another to barely recognize one another if they do at all. Many of us have better relationships with strangers online than we do with those we might pass on our street every day. 

Yet many of the problems that we are likely to face in the future, we and our neighbors will be facing together. It simply makes sense for us to aim for more cohesion and connection with those who live close by—to aim to make our communities more resilient in the face of the changes that may come. 

In my opinion, resilience in a community comes down to three core things:

• Self-Reliance: A community is more resilient when it can meet its own basic needs closer to home.
• Diversity: The more diverse a community, in a range of different ways, the more it can benefit from the strengths of the individuals within it and the more resilient it can be. 
• Connection: A community can boost its resilience by strengthening the connections between its members and by forging strong connections with neighboring communities and within the wider world. 

Think How Your Community Might Meet Its Basic Needs Closer to Home

Becoming less reliant on external resources allows a community to meet more of its own basic needs and boosts its resilience.

This not only means that financially, a community as a whole is more likely to be able to stand on its feet. It also means that a community is not reliant on the fragile systems that all too often surround us in the modern world. 

When a community is responsible for its own water supply, food, energy generation, and so forth, it can better withstand whatever challenges may arise in the years to come. 

Meeting community needs closer to home might involve communal electricity generation systems using renewable power sources.

It might involve growing food in community farms and gardens and empowering individual households within the community to grow their own too. 

It might involve safeguarding watersheds and water sources, and taking steps together to conserve water in neighborhoods. 

It also involves making sure that the skills and knowledge needed for this greater level of self-reliance are available within the community and are fostered in its members. 

Strengthen Diversity of All Kinds

Another important way that we can boost community resilience is by ensuring that we aim for as much diversity as possible—both in natural systems in the area and in human society. 

Diversity in both nature and society is beneficial not only for what each individual can bring to the whole but also for the fact that diversity helps to ensure that there is both built-in redundancy (multiple elements to fulfill each function) and insurance (we cannot lose entirely if we make sure we don't put all of our eggs in one basket). 

Diversity in natural systems and human communities increases the number of beneficial links, thereby strengthening the system as a whole. 

The most resilient communities are those set within functioning ecosystems, with people of all ages, genders, disparate occupations and mindsets, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, etc.

We are strongest of all when we come together because of our differences, not in spite of them, and when we can value each other even when we do not always agree. 

Forge New Connections

Ecosystems that are more biodiverse have more beneficial connections between species, and these connections forge stronger bonds, and make an ecosystem more likely to remain stable yet flexible and stand the test of time. 

The same is true of the social systems of humanity. A strong community will always be one which has forged strong connections between individuals within it, as well as with the natural world. 

There are plenty of ways to forge new connections in communities where these links have not existed or have been lost. It begins with simply creating forums and events where people can meet, and new connections can form.