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Community Resiliency

Disasters such as Hurricane Katrina have demonstrated the complexity of emergencies. However, disasters have also illustrated the ability of communities to come together to help one another through difficult times. An example of this was an Ontario-wide blackout in 2004: the Kids Hotline in Ottawa received hundreds of phone calls from distressed people needing information and reassurance. This service was not part of the organizations mandate; however, the staff and volunteers rose to the challenge. The Kids Hotline knew that they had access to phones and volunteers and were able to respond to the needs of their community.

Building strong communities is essential to enhancing Canada's capacity to respond to emergencies. A key component of this project is to help foster resiliency in communities across Canada. Community resiliency can be defined as the ability of a community to work together, to adapt to change and to respond to unanticipated events such as health emergencies. It involves taking an inventory of assets in a community, including skills, facilities, equipment and communications systems. The overall objective is to encourage collaboration within communities to ensure the safety of everyone, particularly those at high-risk.

Getting Started: Five Easy Steps

We encourage all voluntary sector organizations to prepare for health emergencies and examine the ways in which you can be involved in the community response to such an emergency.

Before an emergency:

1. Take stock of your organization's own resources and examine what impact an emergency could have on your own operations and your ability to deliver services.
2. Understand your environment: Every community is different. What are the voluntary sector and community development organizations that serve your neighbourhood? Find the hidden emergency assets in your community.
3. Build your contact list: Who are the leaders in your community when it comes to emergency management, community development and voluntary sector organizations?
4. Get talking: Once you have identified the leaders, open up the conversation on community resiliency and look at ways to co-operate.
5. Create your own roundtable: Using the Community Resiliency Handbook available on this site as a tool, assemble a roundtable of these leaders to work through the exercises it contains. It will serve as a starting point for collaboration and will open the lines of communication.

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