National Conference on Societal Resilience

03 Jul 2024

Empowering Communities, Building Resilience: Insights and Collaboration at NCSR+ 2024

The National Consortium for Societal Resilience (NCSR+), based at AMBS, ran its second national conference at The Whitworth Hall in March. With more than 170 delegates from local resilience partnerships and voluntary, community, and social enterprise (VCSE) sector organisations across the UK, as well as senior government representatives and partners from policy and practice, the conference also welcomed international delegations from the Municipal Association of Bangladesh, Nigerian Peace Corps, and The Netherlands.

Across two days of networking and discussion, the conference explored what it means to be a leader of societal resilience, how to build societal resilience together as a strategic endeavour, how to better collaborate and partner with others, identifying future risks, and partnership working in a changing context.

Speakers covered areas such as the importance of local leadership in terms of enhancing societal resilience, and what it takes to lead on this agenda and galvanise individual and collective action, while also looking at the challenges faced such as divergence in language and culture among partners, and between local resilience partnerships and local communities.

Limitations caused by a lack of resources, especially financial, were also raised with many communities affected by the cost-of-living crisis. Other sessions looked at how societal resilience is enhanced by hyper-local systems to help people and places to adapt and advance in a changing environment, and what the future might look like in terms of risks and societal resilience.

Duncan Shaw, co-founder of the NCSR+ and Professor of Operations and Critical Systems at AMBS, stated. “This is an opportune moment, considering continuing pressures on public services and budgets, to collaborate strategically as partners in societal resilience and to embrace local community responses as a valuable resource. The NCSR+ will continue to play its part in translating the national ambition on societal resilience, into action by local resilience partnerships that will help people and places to adapt and advance in a changing environment.”