More on resilience and preparedness
The Anglican Alliance is keen to support the local church to build their resilience and preparedness before an emergency, so that they can mitigate the impact of emergencies and respond more effectively when they happen. Resilience and preparedness can also be termed Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), but for churches and communities it is about a lot more than disaster risk reduction.
Building resilience strengthens communities and can reduce loss of life and property during an emergency. A group of Anglican partners, both churches and agencies, came together in 2013-14 to develop a toolkit for the local church to build their resilience and preparedness. Convened by Episcopal Relief & Development, this group created the Pastors and Disasters toolkit, available here. The Toolkit has now been translated into French, Spanish and Portuguese, and together with more information, can be accessed here.
The Pastors and Disasters Toolkit has been used successfully in several parts of the world with real positive impact on communities through the preparedness and improved response of the local church after an emergency. A good example is Sri Lanka, read more here.
A Resilience and Church and Community Mobilisation (CCM) workshop held in Harare, Zimbabwe, in early 2018, identified the following characteristics of a resilient community: community cohesion, diversified livelihoods, land management, infrastructure, human capital and shared analysis. In this context, the recent challenges had been drought, hyperinflation and political tension. Having visited communities in three regions of Zimbabwe that were working on their resilience, key features within these characteristics that strengthened community resilience were identified by participants These features are displayed in the word cloud opposite.
From this it was clear that resilience in these communities came particularly from improved community cohesion and human capital, as well as diversified livelihoods. Communities that come together and plan and prepare for a stronger future have the capacity to withstand shocks, such as drought, better than those that have not. You can learn more about the impact of this on St Christopher’s Church in Rugare, Diocese of Harare, Zimbabwe here
You can read more about the insights gained from the Zimbabwe multi-partnership learning workshop on resilience here.
The local church can go beyond meeting material needs. It is well placed to meet needs that outside agencies don’t have the capacity to meet such as providing safe spaces for the vulnerable, social and spiritual support, someone trusted to listen to the traumatised to help overcome loneliness, despair and hopelessness, caring for the most vulnerable such as the elderly, the very young and those with disabilities.
In situations of conflict, the Church is very important in promoting reconciliation, forgiveness and reuniting communities at local level, as well as at national and regional level. These are great strengths of churches and their value should not be underestimated in the wider response. For example, Anglicans in DR Congo are reuniting women with their families in a community where rape and sexual violence are used as weapons of war.
Building capacity and sharing best practice
The Alliance is a learning organisation, encouraging sharing of experience and learning from churches, agencies and other partners and disseminating best practice. One of our priorities is to improve the level of support that churches are able to provide for their communities, as the most vulnerable are always most impacted by disasters.
This can be through capacity-building in response and resilience before an emergency, including promoting the use of international humanitarian standards, which will allow support from non-church partners. A key tool for this is the Pastors and Disasters Toolkit.
We are also rolling out Anglican Partners in Response and Resilience (PiRR), which offers regional capacity support both for emergency response and for building resilience and preparedness before an emergency. Read more here.
The Anglican Alliance is raising awareness around the Anglican Communion of the importance of resilience and preparedness, looking to strengthen the leadership of the local church in this field, encouraging mainstreaming of resilience and preparedness in all development initiatives and producing resources that will help the local church staff to work in this area.
If you have an experience to share or if you want to know more about our work, please contact anglicanalliance@aco.org.
Resilience workshop, Zimbabwe in 2018
More about resilience
Key points about resilience are described in the audio clip and below:
Building blocks for community resilience
- Individual recovery
- Self determination
- Social networks
- Community cohesion
The Church has a recognised role in developing social assets.
Core services
Resilience needs core services:
- Healthcare
- Education, especially at primary level
- Infrastructure
- Physical resources
- Livelihoods
The Church is a main provider of front-line services and promoter of economic empowerment.
Reflection & learning
Resilience requires community reflection and learning:
- Local beliefs about the causation of disaster may need to be challenged
- Traditional practices may need to be rethought
- New skills, knowledge and information may be needed
Clergy and other respected church leaders are in a key position to influence practices and beliefs.
The Anglican Alliance works to enhance the dedicated work of local Churches in resilience. Our role is to identify and record what happens, learn the lessons, and share them with the rest of the Communion.
And we’re working with faith partners to show the effectiveness of the work of faith communities as part of the Learning Hub Advisory Group on “Resilience in Humanitarian and Disaster Situations” organised by the Joint Learning Initiative on Faith and Local Communities. We facilitated Anglican contributions to a publication making the case for faith communities published by the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford.
There’s a lot more to understand about resilience, and the Church’s role in it The humanitarian community has recognised that faith and religious practices have a powerful impact in enabling people to recover and move on after disasters. You can use the links and downloads on this page to read more about it.
More about disaster risk reduction
Disaster risk reduction is a key concept in relief work. It is based on an understanding of the risks facing a community – the interaction between a local hazard, exposure to the hazard and vulnerability to harm. A community is at risk if:
- There is a local hazard, for example a river prone to flooding,
- The community is exposed to the hazard, for example there are no flood defences
- It is vulnerable, for example because there are houses in the flood plain where very poor people live who cannot escape.
Listen to the audio clip to find out more.
Understanding the risks
- What is the link between poverty and the disasters that affect your community?
- What risks are caused by people like lack of infrastructure, conflict or bad governance?
- What risks to your community are caused by nature?
- Are you affected by climate change, and can you adapt to it?
Planning your church’s action
- Deciding how your Church can provide leadership
- Providing training for Church members in Disaster Risk Reduction
- Establishing early warning systems
- Working with local authorities and other organisations
Mobilising the community
- Using local expertise and knowledge
- Acknowledging physical and human resources in the community
- Including everyone in the process: women, the elderly, people with disabilities and minorities.
- Learning the lessons from the past.
There’s a lot of technical information about disaster risk reduction, which you can read by following these links.