What Makes Communities Resilient?
This week, I was invited to deliver the closing keynote at a national conference exploring the future of sport and recreation. As part of the prep, I found myself pondering what actually makes communities resilient?
Much of my work nowadays is about fostering resilience in individuals but it hasn’t always been this way. I’ve worked with enough disaster response teams and lived through enough cataclysmic changes myself to have thought long and hard about the make-up of resilient communities.
Why Community Resilience Depends on Social Connection
I’ve written previously about the importance of bumping spaces for community resilience. They're the places where we encounter people we wouldn't otherwise meet. Places where the repeated rhythm of everyday life helps weave the social fabric that binds communities together.
The local café. The sports club. The library. The dog park. The community garden. The surf club. The market. The walking group. The supermarket and the library.
Places where we bump into one another by accident.
At first glance, these spaces can seem like nice to have amenities that make neighbourhoods more attractive and communities more enjoyable places to live. However, I suspect they're far more important than that. They are, in fact, where community resilience begins.
Begins being the operative word here. Because you don’t build resilience when you need it most…When you need it most, is, sadly, far too late. Communities survive better in the face of disruption and change when they’re already connected. Years of living through earthquakes taught me and others that.
How Sport, Recreation and Community Spaces Strengthen Resilience
Speaking to the many hugely diverse sports and recreational groups in the audience last week brought this back to me. Chatting to the people there, watching their presentations, learning about what the work they’d put into revitalising and connecting their communities and the impact that had had, reminded me of the vital role our community encounters make for:
Social connection and belonging
Cultural exploration and identity
Contributors to physical and mental wellbeing
Delivering engagement and enjoyment in so many different ways to so many different groups - ages, stages, cultures, salary brackets
Platforms for climate adaptation
Opportunities for ‘in real life’ connection - physically encountering real people and the natural environment which we’re all too rapidly losing touch with in favour of the magnetic attraction of digital and virtual devices
It’s all too easy to think of resilience as an individual quality - something that lives within us. The ability to adapt, persevere and recover when life becomes difficult.
Yet some of the most important resources for resilience don't exist within us at all - they exist between us, and they don’t just save you when you need them, they’re built beforehand.
I've seen this repeatedly over the years. Through my research, my work supporting communities in the wake of natural disasters, and later through the devastating loss of our daughter Abi and friends.
One of the most important lessons I've learned is that community isn't something we create when crisis strikes. It's something we build beforehand. It’s too late to suddenly manufacture connection when life falls apart. In those times we can only draw upon relationships that already exist.
The neighbour who checks in.
The coach who notices there’s something different in you.
The familiar face you've briefly chatted to for years while walking the dog.
The parent you've stood beside on sports sidelines every Saturday morning.
The café owner who asks how you're doing and would notice if you didn’t show.
Many of these relationships begin through nothing more than repeated, ordinary encounters.
Why We Need More Places to Bump Into One Another
An architect friend once described community as "the opportunity for chance encounter". A phrase I've never forgotten. Because the more I look around, the more I wonder whether we're creating fewer opportunities for those encounters than we once did. Less people want to volunteer their time, leave the house on cold winter days, get shouted out by parents on the touch-line, receive emails complaining about the way their club is run.
If we want to thrive, we need to do better. Because none of us will thrive alone. We might increasingly live in silos - but your silo won’t rescue you when the shit hits the fan. We need broader support in tough times.
Our sport and recreation facilities might seem like the fabric of our societies - that’s always been there and always will - but without our investment and involvement that safety net won’t be there to catch us.
Collectively they create the trust, familiarity and belonging that makes up our communities and broader society. They remind us that we are part of something larger than ourselves.
When adversity arrives, as it inevitably does, those connections matter. A great deal.
Community Spaces Are More Than Nice-to-Have Amenities
One of the themes emerging from conversations about the future of sport and recreation is that perhaps we've been thinking about these spaces the wrong way. Rather than viewing them as amenities, maybe we should see them as part of our social infrastructure. Our national infrastructure - that merits investment.
They provide places where relationships form, identities develop, confidence grows and communities strengthen. Long before a flood, fire, economic downturn, bereavement or personal crisis arrives, they are quietly building the social fabric that helps people weather difficult times.
Which is why I think we need to pay more attention to these encounters and the opportunity sports, recreation and community facilities provide as the back bone infrastructure of each of our nations’ resilience.
