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?
What actually makes communities resilient?
Our sport, recreation and other meeting spaces provide the backbone of resilience for communities everywhere.
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 considered both the contribution communities make to each nation’s resilience and the ingredients that produce community resilience itself.
Why Community Resilience Depends on Social Connection
I’ve written previously about the importance of bumping spaces for community resilience and was reminded of it again this week. They're the places where we encounter people we wouldn't otherwise meet: the local café, all the sports clubs, the library, the dog park, community gardens, the pub, the convenience store, the market, courts, walking group, supermarket, and gym.
Places where we bump into one another by accident, and get to know people outside of our singular bubble.
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.
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 the effort they’d put into revitalising and connecting their communities and the impact that has 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. Yet some of the most important resources for resilience don't exist within us at all - they exist between us. And those resources aren’t something we can create when crisis strikes, but have to be built 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, feeds the cat, drags you out of the rubble, or minds your kids until you can get home from whatever awful thing is delaying you. The coach who notices there’s something different in your teenager and stops you in the car park to chat about it. The familiar face you've briefly chatted to for years while walking the dog, who comes to your rescue when you slip and twist your ankle, or the young woman who notices a fellow surfer suddenly fall backwards - struck by a heart attack - and gets him to a life-saving defibrillator recently installed by the crowd sourcing of local early morning swimmers. A true story from our community.
Many of these relationships begin through nothing more than repeated, ordinary encounters. They can be life-saving, literally.
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 nice to have amenities, maybe we should appreciate them more for the role they play in our social infrastructure. Our national infrastructure, even - that merit our care, interest and 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 steadily building the social fabric that helps people weather difficult times.
Which is why I think we need to pay more attention to the chance encounters that the sports, recreation and community facilities provide, as the back bone infrastructure of our communal resilience - and am so utterly grateful to all those who do.
