Exploring Community Resilience

in times of rapid change
what is it? how are people
building it? why does it matter?
exploring
community resilience

Contributors
Author: Nick Wilding, Carnegie UK Trust.
With thanks for contributions and feedback from:
Asha Abraham, Centre for Human Ecology; Paul Allen, Centre for Appropriate Technology; Gary
Alexander, Transition Network; Rachel Bodle, Downham by Design; Kate Braithwaite, Unltd;
Geoff Brown, Carnegie UK Trust; Ann Clark, Centre for Rural Health; Chris Chapman, http://www.
changeexploratory.ie; Steve Clare, Locality; Claire Cooper, Mission Models Money; Eve-Anne
Cullinan, MCO Projects Ireland; Tess Darwin, Falkland Centre for Stewardship; James Derounian,
University of Gloucestershire; Ian Jones, Volunteer Cornwall; Catherine Corcoran, Tipperary Institute;
Helen Fairweather, Resources for Change; Gail Hochachka, Drishti; Tony Hodgson, International
Futures Forum; Alison Jarvis, Joseph Rowntree Foundation; Justin Kenrick, PEDAL; Nicola Kirby,
Action with Communities in Cumbria; Bridget Kirwan, Tipperary Institute; Osbert Lancaster, www.
changemaking.co.uk; Peter Lipman, Transition Network; Graham Leicester, International Futures
Forum; Nigel Lowthrop, Hill Holt Wood; Gehan Macleod, GalGael Trust; Serge Marti, LifeMosaic;
Alastair McIntosh, Centre for Human Ecology; Terry McCormick, Action with Communities in
Cumbria; Duncan MacPherson, North Harris Trust; Deb Muscat, Cumbria Community Foundation;
Lucy Neal, Transition Tooting; Davie Philip, Cultivate Ireland and Cloughjordan Ecovillage; Prof.
Mark Shucksmith, Newcastle University; Sarah Skerratt, Scottish Agricultural College; Bud Simpkin,
Young Suffolk; Mike Small, Fife Diet; Kirsty Tait, Carnegie UK Trust; Tara O’Leary, International
Association for Community Development; Peter Williams, DTA Wales; Rehema White, University of
St. Andrews; Neil Ross, Highlands and Islands Enterprise.
With thanks for editorial and proofing support to colleagues at the Carnegie UK Trust.
Designed by Falconbury
Published by Fiery Spirits Community of Practice
(www.fieryspirits.com), supported by Carnegie UK Trust.
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...exploring community resilience in times of rapid change
1
Table of
Contents
Executive Summary 2
Forword 4
Word Cloud 5
Part 1. Facing into a ‘perfect storm’: resilience practice and policy 6
in times of rapid change
1.1 Case Story: resilient responses to the Cumbria floods of 2009 6
1.2 Learning from Katrina 9
1.3 Leading community resilience: sources of inspiration 12
1.4 The politics of localisation: addressing the resilience imperative? 22
Part 2: Building more resilient communities – guided by a compass 28
of community resilience
2.1 Introducing a ‘compass’ of community resilience 28
2.2 Break Through, Break Even and Break Down: three responses to change 32
2.3 Personal resilience: happy and healthy people 35
2.4 Economy: towards enterprising self-reliance… within energy and ecological limits 40
2.5 Cultural resilience 48
2.6 Cross-Community Links: ‘no community can go it alone’ 56
Appendix 1: Events informing this book 60
Appendix 2: Resilience Compass Community Workshop 62
Appendix 3: Break-through in the life-cycle of organisations 65

2
How this handbook came about
In late June 2009 a member of Carnegie’s rural
development community of
practice posted a blog on
fieryspirits.com.
The blogger reported that
he’d just come out of a meeting with Scottish Government
emergency planners concerned with “the unfolding scenario
of a pandemic flu outbreak”. Officials had been working
flat-out trying to prepare for the worst case scenario: no-one
could be sure how deadly or contagious the flu would be.
And although Prime Minister Gordon Brown had assured
the country that robust plans
were in place, our blogger
wrote that “most of our central
infrastructural systems are
already running in failure mode.
A small glitch in any one of them can rapidly trigger failure
across the board. For example, our pandemic simulation
showed how quickly core services can buckle if some of the
worst-case scenarios unfold this coming winter.” He went
on: ”emergency planning is not the same thing as creating
genuine resilience – certainly as community activists would
understand the term... is this a theme worth developing in
the fiery spirits community?”
By the time Glaxo Smith Klein and Baxter began delivering
the government’s order of 132 million doses of vaccine,
swine flu had left the headlines. November 2009 had
brought massive flooding to Cumbria – and shortly
thereafter disruption on roads, rail and air as the UK and
Ireland experienced its first white Christmas since 2004.
These events underlined the timeliness of our discussion,
now focussed around three core questions:
. what is community resilience?
. how are people building it? and
. why does it matter?
Two years on, we have produced this handbook to share
what we’ve learned more widely. It is full of stories offered
by activists and professionals about what’s working in
practice – and the sources of inspiration underpinning
their work. And it suggests how some of these ideas might
connect with wider policy conversations now in vogue.
Proposing a community resilience framework –
and some key lessons
As the book came together, we invented a new framework
(opposite) to make it simpler to navigate this complex area.
This proposes four key characteristics (or dimensions) of
communities that are becoming more resilient:
. Healthy and engaged people
. An inclusive culture creating a positive sense of place
. A localising economy – towards sustainable food,
energy, housing etc.
. Strong links to other places and communities
This framework has helped reveal a growing body of
practical know-how about how to engage positively with
rapid change. As one participant observed, ‘community
resilience is like a muscle which, when exercised, builds
both strength and flexibility.’
We have learned that:
. Activists are experimenting with asset-based
approaches – including tools like community-led
mapping, risk analysis and oral history. These help to
build trust and a sense of common purpose. Virtuous
circles of activity begin to build, and with it hope for
the future;
. Professionals can collaborate between sectors
and disciplines to serve local agendas: this involves
learning new, enabling roles and taking a ‘humbler
approach’ to management; and
.. Funders and policy makers can help by resourcing
action research into ‘what works’ in building
community resilience in real places. This investment
is most effective when it also supports exchange
and learning between communities with diverse
experiences of coping with – and preparing for –
rapid change.
Crucially, we suggest that a new form of ‘break through’
resilience can emerge as activists, professionals and
policy makers collaborate together - combining graft with
high levels of creativity and fun to invent better futures
than we may previously have thought possible.
Executive
Summary
break-through, break-even or break-down?...break-through, break-even or break-down?...
http://fieryspirits.com/
profiles/blogs/rural-
communities-opportunity
See for example The
Independent, 22nd July
2009 – http://tinyurl.
com/3h44wyy

Next steps
This handbook is the product of a collaborative research and writing process.
We would very much appreciate feedback – and even better, our readers’ active involvement in some next steps.
1) FierySpirits.com
Fieryspirits.com hosts an ongoing focus on the theme of
‘inquiring into community resilience’. To join in, sign up to
the site, which has many more resources to browse. There
is also space to offer your feedback on this book:
. Do you have a resilience story to share?
. Do you want to ask for support for a thorny issue
you’re working through?
. How do we build on this book?
We welcome contributions from diverse perspectives –
activists, practitioners, funders, policy makers, students,
volunteers and more.
2) Email
Contact report author Nick Wilding direct
(nick@carnegieuk.org) to discuss this report – or
opportunities connected with the Community of
Practice more widely
3) Twitter (twitter.com)
Follow @comresilience for live updates and news.
4) Community Resilience animation
Content from this handbook has been developed into a
lively animated film. Find it at http://fieryspirits.com/page/
inquiring-into-community
3
Healthy Engaged People
“I’m happy and fit in mind and body”
Cross-community links
“We collaborate with other communities near
and far – we know no place can go it alone”
Inclusive, creative culture
“We’re confident inour diversity –
creating a great future together”
Localised economy
within ecological limits
“We steward our land, food, water,
energy, services, jobs, housing”

4
A note on defining community resilience
… if resilience is the ability to respond
constructively to the unknown – to the
shocks that come upon us in society –
those shocks can come from anywhere.
We can anticipate some of them but surely
not all of them. How do you prepare
yourself for that degree of not known?
participant, Rural Convention
There is no universally agreed definition of
‘community resilience’. This
may be a good thing. It
means that local people can
be free to come up with the
definition that works for them.
In some places using the term
‘community resilience’ might
help to galvanise a group
into action; in others, it might
be off-putting. Ultimately, it
doesn’t really matter what this
work is called: what matters
most is that it helps people future-proof their communities
on the basis of agreed values. From this starting point, this
book sets out to explore questions that include:
. How are communities already resilient? … and is it
possible to ‘break through’ to create communities
which are more resilient in the context of future
challenges?
. What is community resilience, anyway? Can we boil
it down to a few dimensions to keep in focus?
. What outside help from other communities, funders,
government and others might be useful?
How to read this handbook
The book has two parts, with appendices:
. Part 1 sets the scene, investigating the
opportunities and challenges for community
resilience during turbulent times; and
. Part 2 proposes a simple way of thinking about
community resilience – a ‘resilience compass’ –
that suggests four crucial dimensions of resilience
building. We investigate each dimension in turn
using quotes from CoP participants, case studies,
and insights from the resilience literature.
. Appendices: There are three appendices: a
summary of the Community of Practice events that
this book builds on, a sample ‘resilience compass’
workshop outline, and an introduction to a related
‘parabola’ model of change in organisations.
Optimised for reading on screen.
The downloadable version of this handbook is optimised
for on-screen reading, including many ‘live’ links to
make it very easy to click through to toolkits, references,
newspaper articles and much more. There are internal links
too – such as the page numbers in the table of contents.
‘Resilience’ is a
relative term that can
look wildly different in
different contexts and
according to different
developmental stages
of community life.
Likewise, ‘community’
is a contested idea that
makes different kinds
of sense according to
the values, location and
perspective of the reader.
Foreword
break-through, break-even or break-down?...

5
Word Cloud
On many websites a ‘word cloud’ helps visitors to get a quick feel of a site’s content…
We copied the idea to generate a ‘cloud’ of key words used throughout this book
(thanks to www.wordle.net for the software that makes this easy). The relative size
of the word indicates how many times it appears in the text – the largest appearing
most frequently:

6
Resilient – it means that you’re strong
and flexible doesn’t it – as a community,
it means you’ve the strength to sustain
yourself as a community and a bit of
flexibility, a bit of muscle….
Cornish community activist, interviewed at ‘
Sense of Place event’, Eden Project 2009
This part of the book sets some broad
context – looking at issues of both practice
and policy – which later sections build on.
It begins by looking again at something
of what’s been learned following the
Cumbrian floods of November 2009.
1.1 Case Story: resilient responses to the Cumbria floods of 2009
On Thursday 19th November 2009 over sixty Cumbrian
communities experienced a torrential downpour. Each
has a story to tell of those days when British records
were broken two towns in particular – Cockermouth
and Workington – were thrust into the spotlight as the
national news media streamed dramatic pictures of the
Cocker and Derwent rivers as they broke their banks,
plunging businesses, shops and homes under water. In
Cockermouth levels rose to 2.5 metres (8ft 2in). As the
waters rushed downstream, PC Bill Barker lost his life as
the Northside Bridge collapsed and not long afterwards
two further bridges collapsed, splitting Workington in two.
1200 properties lost their electricity supply and people
were stranded but local volunteers and emergency
services quickly rose to the challenge. While RAF
helicopters from three bases rescued 48 people, the RNLI
deployed forty-one volunteers within five hours in nine
inshore lifeboats, rescuing about 300 people, Mountain
Rescue volunteers worked tirelessly. The full extent of
the voluntary effort could be glimpsed at Christ Church,
in the town’s South Street, which became a local hub of
operations. Cumbria Voluntary Agencies Committee and
Cumbria Constabulary worked side by side to ensure the
immediate response was co-ordinated and effective.
Margarette Driscoll, writing in the
Sunday Times (18th
July 2010),
described how “some volunteers
were handing out tea and cake;
others were organising teams to
go into flooded homes and rescue
precious pieces of furniture or photo
albums. The Red Cross was on
hand for medical emergencies, Age
UK was helping with shocked and shaken elderly people
and a new organisation, Street Angels, was just being set
up to offer support when the waters subsided and people
attempted to return to their homes.”
A few days later in Workington, Royal Engineers set to
work building a new footbridge, to be named after PC
Barker. On its completion, the BBC interviewed Inspector
Mark Wear (Workington Police): “This footbridge is a
tangible symbol of how we are starting to rebuild the area
and getting back to normal”.
Pictures: grateful thanks to Visit Cumbria site
at http://www.visitcumbria.com/foot-and-
mouth-disease-in-cumbria.htm
thanks for http://www.visitcumbria.com/
cockermouth-floods.htm for this image
Comprising
Rotary International,
Churches Together
in Cumbria, the
Red Cross, St John
Ambulance, the
Salvation Army,
Raynet, WRVS,
Mountain Rescue
and Samaritans
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/
cumbria/8398538.stm
1

7
As soon as news broke of the impending bad weather, the
Cumbria Community Foundation had initiated plans to
set up a Cumbria Flood Recovery Fund. The fund raised
more than £1m. Deb Muscat, co-ordinator of the fund
testifies that Cumbria’s “strong volunteering ethos and
density of activists” has been a very significant factor in
enabling the recovery of the region. She is working with
third sector partners from across Cumbria to research the
contribution the sector has made to both easing hardship
in the immediate aftermath, as well as the longer term
work of rebuilding social networks, enabling dispersed
friends to connect regularly, supporting businesses and
clubs with insurance claims, improving flood defences…
and sustaining the psychological health people who, after
three months of living away from home (perhaps with the
relatives), are showing signs of stress.
Revisiting her initial story several months later, Driscoll
wrote another story that sought out an angle on the ‘Big
Society’. She interviewed Cockermouth GP John Howarth
about how the “most extraordinary upsurge of community
spirit” following the floods had enabled his surgery to
initiate some changes in the way his practice delivered
better health outcomes: offering Age UK a peppercorn rent
to share premises, Howarth advocates that co-location
enables Age UK’s volunteers to support more older people
to stay in their homes, cutting down on expensive hospital
visits. The idea is that money saved by the NHS will go
to support further health-related initiatives such as the
local University of the Third Age, “a big social network”
which runs courses which are “a good alternative to
antidepressants for someone who’s lonely and depressed”.
We then discover that Howarth and colleagues have found
inspiration for some of this innovation in John McKnight’s
ideas about asset-based community development: “He’s
given us a different view of the community that we serve,
and that was crystallised during the flood, when so many
people came forward and were willing to help”.
Facing into
a ‘perfect
storm’:
resilience
practice
and policy
in times
of rapid
change

8
There are many more stories of Cumbrian resilience
to be learned from. Terry McCormick of Action with
Communities in Cumbria has noted that “Keswick had/
has one of the best emergency plans in place in the UK
and this enabled a ‘bounce-back’ to ‘Keswick is open
for business’ in a matter of days”. In our conversations
with Cumbrian activists and volunteers, we picked up
a determined urgency to their continuing work, now
focusing on building on and sharing lessons from what
has been achieved so far: the question on their minds
is when, not if, more shocks will arrive. The sector has
been assisted in this task by the Big Lottery, which has
demonstrated considerable foresight by pro-actively
funding local organisations to capture lessons learned.
The Northern Rock Foundation has also been notably
active supporting learning and the recovery work of
local organisations.
There are already insights worth noting:
1 Deb Muscat, of the Cumbria Flood Recovery Fund, has
testified that the shocks of Foot and Mouth in 2001
and then flooding in Carlisle and surrounding area
in 2005 left people better prepared for the events of
2009. In particular, there are today improved systems
of preparation, co-ordination and collective learning.
It seems that the idea that resilience is like a muscle
is born out in practice – a sentiment reaffirmed by the
Global Resilience Network:
Resiliency is like a muscle … that must be
developed in advance and consistently
exercised [to] be both strong enough
to withstand severe challenges and
flexible enough to handle a wide range of
unpredictable forces.
http://www.globalresiliency.net
2 An RNLI volunteer, interviewed by Third Sector
newspaper, said that “some of the fire and rescue
service boats weren’t capable of doing the job….
We were more or less the experts in the field, so we
were tasking people as we saw fit”. This anecdote
suggests the ways in which such events can catalyse
new working arrangements between voluntary
organisations and emergency services – representing a
step-change in the effective deployment of resources?
3 The Cumbria Flood Recovery Fund has amassed a lot
of insight into how best to support families long after
the initial event. This know-how will be valuable for
others to learn from.
Mitchells old warehouse on Lorton St is converted into a
‘market’ – a temporary home to several businesses.
Photo by David Stephenson. With thanks to http://www.
visitcumbria.com/cockermouth-floods.htm
The research tests how resilience thinking can be
better built into community-led planning processes;
and trialing ‘Community Emergency Plans’ in four
rural communities – to enable communities to survive
without outside assistance for 36-48 hours following
a future emergency event.
Quoted in Third Sector 25th January
2010, online at http://www.thirdsector.
co.uk/News/Article/979198/Emergency-
response-Cumbria-floods/
Thanks for http://www.visitcumbria.com/
cockermouth-floods.htm for this image

9
1.2 Learning from Katrina
In November 2009, Community of Practice members
met in Kendal, Cumbria just as the flood waters were
beginning to rise. One session focused on community
resilience – and attracted sixty participants who didn’t
need reminding about the significance of the howling wind
and lashing rain outside. Over ninety minutes, we thought
hard about what community resilience was about – and
shared some of our questions about the topic.
One contributor came from a social enterprise called
Hillholt Wood in Lincolnshire. Hillholt has attracted local
and national attention of late because, at a time when
councils are cutting budgets, Hillholt is growing, and
fast. The initiative started from what many would view as
an unpromising and depleted scrap of woodland. Over
several years, the dedicated staff and volunteers have
unlocked the potential in this asset, and in the process
have generated employment and training opportunities
and a hive of community activity.
Hillholt co-founder Nigel Lowthrop is a regular contributor
into the Community of Practice. During our Cumbria
workshop, Nigel recalled hearing social capital pioneer
Tom Sander
speak about
the aftermath
of Hurricane
Katrina (2005) in
New Orleans. He recalled that Sander had compared the
experience of New Orleans with that of the villagers in
Indonesia following the Tsunami of 26th
December 2004:
… in the most advanced technological
largest economy in the world, America …
thousands of people were moved out of New
Orleans for their own safety and have never
gone back … [whereas] Northern Indonesia
was hit by that big wave and it recovered
remarkably quickly in part due to fact that
it did have social capital…’
Nigel Lowthrop (transcribed from Cumbria event recording)
The story hit a nerve in the room. As contributions
followed, it became clear that many people concurred
that social capital is a helpful framework for thinking about
resilience building – and that the case of New Orleans
is instructive. Following up the lead, a google search
revealed an article that Sander wrote for the Boston Globe
in November 2005:
‘Social capital’ describes the benefits of social
networks. Having friends and being involved
in groups not only secures jobs – more
Americans get jobs through who they know
than what they know – but improves one’s
health, education, and happiness…
Relatively recently our hearts were pained
by a sea of black and poor victims, trapped
on the Gulf Coast pre-Hurricane without an
exit. We notice that they were carless and
lacked money for bus fare, meals, and hotels.
But far fewer notice that the poor were
equally trapped by a dearth of these social
connections, especially crossing economic
lines. Specifically, they lacked affluent
friends to give them a ride, lacked contacts
to negotiate heavily discounted hotel rates,
and lacked out-of-town relatives with extra
bedrooms.
Boston Globe November 14th 2005
See http://hillholtwood.com/about/
For the Boston Globe article, see
http://www.boston.com/news/
globe/editorial_opinion/oped/
articles/2005/11/14/a_friend_in_need/
Sander contributes to ‘the Saguaro
Seminar’ at John F. Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard University – see
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/saguaro/

10
Sander’s article points out how the disaster revealed how
Katrina revealed the rifts between New Orleans’ citizens.
Whilst some used their savings and ‘linking’ capital to
escape, others had little choice but to stay and risk death.
Eighteen months after the hurricane, the Washington Post
reported how thousands of volunteers were supporting
residents in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward to gut houses
so they could be eligible for federal rebuilding funds.
By 2010, a Community Reinvestment Conference meeting
in New Orleans brought together many hopeful stories in
a podcast called Lots of Feet on the Street: Communities,
Culture and the Rebuilding of New Orleans.
Meanwhile, a resurgent private sector was celebrating its
success in driving forward major reforms in public service
provision. On August 26th
, 2010 Newsweek reported how
the entire schooling system had been re-designed in
favour of new private charter schools.
Theory spot:
Three types of ‘Social Capital’
Building community resilience involves developing the ‘social capital’ of a community. A growing international
movement has developed the practice and theory of social capital since the 1970s. Robert Putnam’s book Bowling
Alone built on previous work by Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman by describing the ways we can enhance
wellbeing by strengthening “connections among individuals – social networks and the norms of reciprocity and
trustworthiness that arise from them.” Putnam’s research showed that “in measurable
and well-documented ways, social capital makes an enormous difference to our lives.”
Tom Sander has outlined three types of social capital:
Bonding capital is the close
ties between people in similar
situations – such as family and
close friends. It builds trust,
reciprocity, and a shared sense
of belonging and identity.
Bridging capital is the looser
ties to similar people, such as loose
friendships, colleagues, or perhaps
people we meet through social
networking sites. It builds broader,
more flexible identities and
enables innovations to be shared
across networks.
Linking capital helps ensure
that people with different levels of
power and status meet and learn
from one another. It is the ability
of groups to access networks of
power and resources beyond their
immediate community.
Robert Putnam (2000) Bowling
Alone: The collapse and revival of
American community, New York:
Simon and Schuster.
http://www.washingtonpost.
com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2006/12/26/
AR2006122600774.html
http://www.
newsweek.
com/2010/08/26/
new-orleans-s-
charter-school-
revolution.htmlListen here: http://www.
frbsf.org/community/
conference2010.html

11
The article quotes Paul Vallas, a superintendent of
the Recovery School District: “We used Katrina as
an opportunity to build—not rebuild, but build … an
overwhelmingly publicly funded, predominantly privately
run school system.” The article did not, however, point
out the controversy surrounding this move: many African-
American parents fought the move, fearful that the
principle established by the civil rights movement that all
children should receive the same standard of education
might be reversed.
The speed and scale of these changes reveals how
shocks can open opportunities for those promoting radical
change – whatever the values informing this change. In
her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein make a similar
point when she quotes Milton Friedman’s 1962 manifesto
for free market economics, Capitalism and Freedom:
Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces
real change. When that crisis occurs, the
actions that are taken depend on the ideas
that are lying around. That, I believe, is
our basic function: to develop alternatives
to existing policies, to keep them alive and
available until the politically impossible
becomes politically inevitable… a new
administration has some six to nine months
in which to achieve major changes; if it does
not act decisively during that period, it will
not have another such opportunity.”
Klein goes on to note that three months after the New
Orleans levees broke Friedman chose as the topic of
his final Wall Street Journal column (he died shortly
afterwards) the opportunity presented to the Bush
administration to promote a voucher system enabling
charter school development.
At the end of our Cumbria workshop, groups reported
back on the topics they’d chosen to focus on. Some had
looked at issues of leadership. One group in particular
reported a conversation about how civil society leadership
is crucial during times of shock: these are moments when
civil society organisations need to be at their most active,
organised and effective – and yet these are also the times
when it can be hard to look beyond immediate questions
of community and organisational survival. Others
responded to the conversation by asking how community
based organisations can stay on the ‘front foot’ during
these times – holding vested interests to account through
the democratic process – and ensuring that positive,
community-led solutions win visibility and support. During
times of rapid change, one contributor suggested, the
direction of transformation will be determined by the
values of those ready and willing to exploit these times.
Both Friedman quotes are Klein (ibid.) quoting
Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962: 2).

12
1.3 Leading community resilience: sources of inspiration
This small community has just built its own
community centre, new church and a curling
rink and homes for seniors, which is what they
call their older people. They have attracted
some funding in from government but most of
that was physically done with their own hands
…they realised that if they wanted something
they had to do it themselves and they had the
skills within their community. It is that local
intent and community leadership that has
led to quite remarkable achievements in a
very small very rural community which was
focusing on the local leadership…
Participant, 2009 Carnegie UK Trust Rural Convention,
reporting on a visit to Nova Scotia
Significant community development takes
place only when local community people are
committed to investing themselves and their
resources in the effort…. community builders
are refocusing attention on capacities and
assets, and are inventing new methods for
mobilising neighbourhood residents.
Kretzmann and McKnight, Building Communities from the
Inside Out (1993)
Across the UK and Ireland there are many, many activists
and practitioners whose work often flies under the media
radar, but who can play a role in shaping the resilience-
enabling policy of the future. They range from social
entrepreneurs in Argyll and Bute who are coming together
with council staff to sustain (through re-invention) local
services even as austerity measures bite hard;
to unlikely alliances of retired
servicemen, ethical bankers and land
campaigners who are creating community land trusts to
deliver affordable local housing and many other benefits.
They are logistics experts in Devon
who have invented a new way to
distribute healthy food direct to people on low incomes,
and we have learned lessons from the dedication of a tiny
team who put on an annual ‘festival of stewardship’ for
10,000 people on a
shoestring budget.
And in Tipperary we have
met a tenacious group that, over ten years, has changed
planning legislation to bring world-class rural development
to Cloughjordan bringing jobs,
businesses and hope even as the
wider Irish economy buckles.
These practitioners are redefining what we understand by
community leadership. Rather than the more traditional
idea of a community ‘gatekeeper’, we understand a
leader to be someone (anyone) who steps forward to
take initiative with the support of local people. To this
end, community of practice events allow participants the
space to recognise, celebrate and at times challenge each
others’ practice as community leaders. Often some big
insights can come when we use this space to explore the
assumptions, motivations and sources of inspiration that
underpin our work.
Whilst professionals might
describe these sources in
terms of their role or training in
a particular tradition (such as
‘asset based’ or ‘endogenous’ development), activists may
take a more eclectic stance, involving ‘hoovering up’ good
ideas wherever they can be found – and applying them
whenever they seem to ‘fit’.
This section weaves between these two stances to reveal
some of the sources of inspiration that are informing the
work of the resilience pioneers we have met.
See www.absen.org.uk
See http://www.communitylandtrusts.org.uk/
See the Big Tent festival, Fife
at www.bigtentfestival.co.uk
See
www.thevillage.ie
See Carnegie UK Trust’s
publication Appreciating
Assets has already
offered an overview of
some of these traditions.
See the Stroud Co Food Hub (with open source software) at
www.stroudco.co.uk; the Fife Diet at www.fifediet.co.uk; and
Falkland Centre for Stewardship’s report Our Mutual Food at
http://www.centreforstewardship.org.uk/oneplanetfood.htm
Cumbria event

13
Moses Coady and the
Antigonish movement
Moses Coady was born into a large Irish Catholic family
on a farm in the Margaree Valley of Cape Breton, Nova
Scotia, in 1882. As a boy, he saw young men and women
leaving the valley for industrial jobs far away – in coal
mines and steel mills such as Edgar Thomson Steel Works
in Braddock, Pennsylvania, where Andrew Carnegie
started his steel empire. Coady
would go on to spend a lifetime
searching for solutions that
would mean young people
had a choice about whether
to leave or not, addressing
what he termed a “weird
pessimism (that) so benumbed
everybody that nothing has
been attempted to break the spell.” In 1927, Coady
testified before a Canadian government commission that
adult education – which he summed up as learning skills
in critical thinking, scientific methods of planning and
production, and co-operative entrepreneurship – could
transform and revitalise local rural economies.
Having won the endorsement of the
Maclean Commission, Coady and his colleague Father
Jimmy Tompkins won the support of both the Carnegie
and Rockefeller Foundations to expand the reach of what
they called the Antigonish movement. In the following
years, and through the voluntary efforts of thousands
of villagers engaging in study clubs, a raft of new credit
unions and co-operatives were established, supporting
agricultural marketing, fish canning, dairy farming, retail
sales and housing.
These credit unions offered what many would call micro
credit today, enabling farmers, fishers and miners to
survive the toughest days of the Great Depression of the
1930s. By 1945 there were over 400 credit unions, with
70,000 members and $4.2 million in assets. Reflecting
on this success, Coady summed up the Antigonish
philosophy with the phrase ‘use what you have to secure
what you have not’.
Today, the Coady International Institute at St. Francis
Xavier University, Nova Scotia continues to evolve the
Antigonish tradition of ‘igniting leadership’ “with innovative
people and organisations to create effective, practical
and sustainable solutions to reduce global poverty and
injustice”.
Popular education:
‘rehearsing’ resilience
The Antigonish movement can be seen as part of a
broader popular education movement that emerged in
many places through the early twentieth century. What
Coady called ‘weird pessimism’, Brazilian Paulo Freire
termed a ‘culture of silence’ that he proposed came
about as rural people uncritically accepted the view
of ‘oppressors’ that they were by nature backward and
unable to rise about their station.
Breaking this culture of silence, Freire proposed,
involved changing education from a ‘banking’ model
(which assumes that people are empty vessels to be
filled by other peoples’ knowledge) to an approach
that enables people to decide what to learn, and how
to learn it, for themselves. He called this new way of
learning ‘conscientisation’ – becoming more conscious
of the potential in places and people, and critical of the
structures in society which maintain power imbalances.
Contributions such as Freire’s helped people to
understand how to recover from the adverse impacts
of colonisation. It helped to inspire a mass literacy
movement amongst the landless poor in Latin America
throughout the 1960s and 1970s, which was supported
by a radicalised Catholic clergy. This movement sowed
ideas that still reverberate across Latin America (as well as
Africa, India and even the UK and Ireland) today.
http://www.coady.stfx.ca/
See Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1974) or his more
readable Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, Continuum Publishing Company (1994).
Jim Lotz.
The Humble Giant:
Moses Coady, Canada’s
Rural Revolutionary.
Novalis, Ottawa, 2005,
pp. 14-16 quoted in
http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Moses_Coady
Andrew Carnegie’s Edgar Thomson
Steel Works, 1875:a visible emblem
of another period of rapid change
from the collection of the Heinz
History Center HSWP, accessed
from http://images.library.pitt.edu

14
This history helps to explain why some CoP participants
find popular education
methods good resources
for thinking about
resilience today (see, for
example, Anne Hope and
Sally Timmel’s Training
for Transformation books,
full of exercises for use
by community groups).
For example, some popular educators have discovered
the power of using simulation exercises to enable
community groups to ‘rehearse’ real life scenarios
before they encounter them. The same idea is behind
Lord Sugar’s The Apprentice TV show, which pits young
executive hopefuls against each other through a gruelling
series of sales tasks; likewise, the armed forces and
emergency services regularly conduct exercises as if they
were in real-life combat or responding to nuclear power
accidents, terrorist incidents and the like.
When set up by skilled trainer, simulations can generate
learning that may otherwise take years to amass: the
Cumbrian story has already demonstrated that rehearsal
may be a crucial element in exercising the resilience
‘muscle’. Workshops can last anything from an hour
to many days: groups are plunged into exaggerated
scenarios that involve heightened stress, hazards,
opportunities, and challenges. If done outdoors in
unfamiliar environments, the learning can be even greater
as participants aren’t able to fall back on their usual
routines or knowledge. Crucially, an effective simulation
exercise must build in enough time for ‘unpacking’ the
learning afterwards – in this way, blind-spots are revealed,
confidence increases, and community capacity can be
strengthened.
Training is offered by Partners
in Ireland – http://www.
trainingfortransformation.ie/
and Re:generate Trust (http://
www.regeneratetrust.org/). In
Scotland, the Centre for Human
Ecology (www.che.ac.uk) also
developed the approach over
several years. http://www.
infed.org/biblio/b-poped.htm
Resources
Resources CoP members are finding useful include:
. The ‘Bare Foot Guide’ – see http://www.barefootguide.org –
developed by the Cape Town based Centre for
Developmental Practice.
. Conflict transformation and resolution approaches;
. Carnegie UK Trust’s handbook and guide to ‘power analysis’.
Thanks to Gary Alexander of Transition Towns
Network (http://www.earthconnected.
net/earthconnected/Home.html), Verene
Nicolas (a non-violent communication
trainer – see http://www.verenenicolas.org/
effectivecomm.html) and Helen Fairweather,
Resources for Change (http://www.r4c.
org.uk/) for sharing their experience about
working with conflict. See also ‘community
conflict’ resource pack produced by the UK
Government Home Office in 2006 – http://
www.communities.gov.uk/documents/
communities/pdf/884762.pdfSee http://democracy.carnegieuktrust.org.uk/democracy/power_tools

15
Participatory Action Research
… there’s a risk of making ‘resilience’ an
output … [for example, acting in new voice:]
“I’m a community network manager: I’m
going to manage your resilience, you’ll be
more resilient under me!... And I represent
the organisation that has made you so poor
in the first place – but its’ OK!
Carnegie UK Trust Community of Practice participant
‘Sustainability’ smacks of academia, clever
people coming in to tell you what to do,
whereas ‘resilience’ smacks of something you
do for yourself or you do for your community…
A group I work with …middle aged, Welsh
speaking men finding a way of existing,
continuing, building in a community and in a
society that’s rapidly changing around them.
It’s related in a sense to resistance… so you
have resistance, and then you build resilience…
they’ve been resisting for so long you can get
stuck in the negatives … but with resilience
you can actually move the thing on
Participant, Sense of Place event within Fiery Spirits
Community of Practice, 2008
A recurrent theme at Community of Practice events is
frustration voiced by activists about professionals who
hold onto power inappropriately; and the frustration of
professionals who feel themselves trapped within institutions
and ways of working that don’t match their values. But
we have also heard how an approach called ‘participatory
action research’ (PAR) can help to break the impasse … by
enabling the ‘co-production’ of resilience outcomes.
PAR has its roots in the 1980s and 90s when some
development professionals started questioning their
work within the international
‘aid industry’. In his book
Challenging the Professions,
Robert Chambers (of the
Institute for Development
Studies, Sussex) proposed
replacing or re-skilling ‘normal professionals’ to become
‘new professionals’, skilful in enabling service of community-
led agendas (rather than imposing change from above/
outside). The phrase ‘on tap, not on top’ was coined: these
people would be first and foremost accomplished listeners,
trust-builders, networkers and facilitators. Courses were
developed to help professionals make the shift.
In this way, PAR facilitators would support communities
as they took ownership of their own research agendas.
Research would be ‘with people, not on them’, and the
values of diversity and inclusion would be at the heart
of the approach: the assumption is that social justice
outcomes are more likely if the full diversity of community
voices can be heard and respected.
These are values that resonate with many members of
our Community of Practice. Ensuring inclusion remains at
the core of effective community development work, and
workshop participants affirmed their view that PAR tools
(which have evolved considerably) continue to be some of
the best ways to ensuring diverse local voices play a full
part in resilience building.
As communities take more charge of their own research
agendas (and see their developing story as a valuable
community asset in itself), local researchers can learn
about patterns of resilience or vulnerability within a
community. Rather than relying on outsiders to design
research purposes, methodologies and write up results,
PAR puts local people in the driving seat. Local people
decide if and when to draw on outside expertise. They then
define the terms on which this expertise is hired (often in
the role of a ‘critical friend’ to challenge local blind-spots
and assumptions, as well as offering technical expertise).
This kind of work is particularly well developed beyond
the UK and Ireland. International relief and development
agencies such as Christian Aid, ActionAid, Practical
Action, and Oxfam have long track-records
championing participatory approaches to benefit the
most vulnerable communities and regions. Many of the
fruits of their work are available online. For example,
ActionAid International’s Participatory Vulnerability
Analysis toolkit begins by acknowledging how daunting it
can be for local people to begin this work:
Chambers, R. 1993.
Challenging the
Professions: Frontiers
in Rural Development.
London: ITDG Publishing.
Action Aid’s ‘Participatory Vulnerability Toolkit’
is available for download, along with many other
international agency toolkits, from http://www.
proventionconsortium.org/?pageid=39. For
example, ActionAid’s toolkit has as an early step a
table about identifying ‘available information’ and
‘information gaps’ in existing knowledge towards
better understanding the ‘vulnerable situation’ (its
extent and ability of people to cope); the causes of
this vulnerability; and the community assets and
sources of external support available.

16
Anyone faced with the prospect of eating an
elephant would be daunted. Too big! Where
to start! But faced with manageable pieces
the prospect appears more comprehensible.
So with vulnerability – faced with such a
complex concept there seems little prospect of
addressing it. But if analysed as a participatory
process, some specific solutions will become
apparent for any particular context.
Roger Yates, Head of International Emergencies Team,
Action Aid
Christian Aid has developed and tested an integrated
approach to disaster risk reduction incorporating
innovative ideas such as encouraging local communities
to track their own experiences of unusual weather events,
and then compare them with climate science models. A
formula has been designed to inform this process:
Knowing about ‘climate risk’ really matters in places
where impacts from disrupted weather patterns can
make the difference between life or death.
Whole systems thinking
‘Vulnerability is the flip side of Resilience’
Professor Paedar Kirby, University of Limerick, Ireland
There is no power for change like a
community discovering what it cares about
Margaret Wheatley, author of Turning to One Another
In 2007, Carnegie UK Trust’s Commission for Rural
Development published a Charter for Rural Communities
that adopted a ‘flower’ metaphor to propose twelve
characteristics of the ‘rural community of the future’:
TheCommissioners’job,astheysawit,wasto
openurbanandruraleyestothecapitalassetsof
thecountryside,andtogivethepeoplewholive
andworkinruralareasthekeystoasustainable
future.Itwasaradicalchangeinpolicyforthe
Commission’sparent,theCarnegieUKTrust,
whohadtomovebeyondtheirtraditionalfocus
onruralgrass-rootsfundingtothebiggerpicture:
anoverviewwhichidentifiedthestructuraland
systemicchallengesinruralareas,examinedthe
wholemechanismforsustainingrurallifeand
proposedsolutions.
Dame Diana Brittan, Chair, Commission for Rural
Communities (2007)
AchievingFairnessforEveryone
Empowering Local Governance
Increasing Financial Resources
EnjoyingLocallyRelevantServices
latipaC
laicoSgnihcirnE
gnieblleWdna
ValuingLocalDistinctiveness
Developing Reliable Infrastructure
Enhancing Environmental Capacity
SupportingaDynamicLocalEconomy
stessAgnisimitpO
Growing Capacity
Building Capital
Realising Participative
Community Planning
THE CARNEGIE COMMISSION FOR RURAL COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
A particularly useful innovation in the Christian Aid approach
is an appreciation that local knowledge and climate science
can help each other to develop more accurate models:
Where science and local knowledge agree, confidence
increases. Where they disagree reveals interesting points
for discussion. For example, a low-density network of
meteorology stations may miss flash floods cited by the
community as a major emerging threat. On the other hand,
community knowledge may be vulnerable to biases which
need to be addressed by the scientific record.
Christian Aid’s approach as summarised in Richard Ewbank
presentation at December 2009 Practical Action Seminar,
further useful international resources all available from:
http://www.practicalaction.org/reducing-vulnerability/
integrating-approaches-seminar#posters
Climate
Risk =
Climate
change
trends and
variability
x
Likely
exposure
to these
trends
x
vulnerability
capacity to
adapt
Professor Paedar Kirby is one of the first residents in an
‘ecovillage’ development within Cloughjordan, County Tipperary,
Ireland. His work has taken him all around the world, especially to
Latin America, working alongside communities who are surviving
against the odds and fighting for their basic human rights. Paedar
has seen how trends in economic globalisation and climate
change has contributed to bringing some communities to their
knees, whilst others survive with community spirit intact. A key
lesson of his travels is that “to really know how resilient we are, we
must first understand our vulnerability”.
Carnegie
Commission
for Rural
Development
‘Petal’ model of
‘the dynamic,
vibrant, engaged,
sustainable rural
community in
the future’

17
As the Commission’s Chair made clear, a key innovation
coming form the work was to take a systems view of
rural development – stressing
how the most successful
rural communities are those
which take a ‘joined up’ view
of developing all manner of
community assets.
This insight has much in common
with innovations that have
emerged in other areas of policy
making in recent years. For example, in 1999 the UK
Department for International Development (DfiD) set out
a ‘livelihoods’ framework through a series of guidance
sheets (see www.livelihoods.org/info) suggested that a
“livelihood is sustainable when a person or household can
face or recover from shock and stress and at the same
time maintain or improve their resources and capacities
without deteriorating their natural resource base”. The
idea was that community well-being involves five core
resources (or ‘capitals’) – human, social, natural, physical,
and financial.
DfiD’s ‘capitals’ approach was part of a wider shift in
development thinking that Caroline Moser has summed up
in her book Reducing Global Poverty: the case for Asset
Accumulation:
Asset-based approaches in development
focus on how [people] use their resource
base to develop strategies for acquiring,
mobilising, expanding, and preserving their
assets… asset-based approaches address
inequality in resource endowments and
access to opportunity, providing a concrete
way to measure empowerment and ultimately
sustainable reduction in poverty… Ownership
and effective mobilisation of assets help
establish personal and family security and
encourage risk taking and diversification of
productive and social activities.
Caroline Moser: Reducing Global Poverty: The Case for
Asset Accumulation
Moser’s definition is careful to reflect the complexity
of communities: resilience is a function of personal,
family, whole community and larger scale interactions.
Livelihoods approaches recognise that communities are
fluid: each place follows its unique evolutionary path,
increasingly influenced by patterns of migration and virtual
connectivity through high speed internet connections
which mean that ‘local’ people may hardly relate even to
the street in which where they live.
This complexity gives rise to lots of practical and policy
challenges. Some researchers in Carnegie’s Rural Action
Research Programme tackled this by setting out to
unearth how one person’s ‘asset’ may be another’s
‘liability’ – and how this perspective might change as
their circumstances alter.
Community activists might
recognise this issue more
concretely, asking how it is
fair that one resident can
enjoy Mediterranean cruises
whilst a neighbour might
fall ill from being unable to
heat their house (whilst their
home heating
oil prices sky-rocket).
Carnegie UK Trust
published a follow-
up document to the
Charter in 2009. A
Manifesto for Rural
Communities gives
many examples
of asset based
development in action.
See for example work
undertaken by the New
Economics Foundation for
Carnegie’s Rural Action
Research Programme:
Enterprise Ecology, Multi-
strand Livelihoods and Rural
Community Development
available from http://rural.
carnegieuktrust.org.uk/
rarp/sustainable_assets/
new_economics_
foundation
Big Tent Event
A report by IACD and Carnegie UK Trust
Appreciating AssetsTara O’Leary, Ingrid Burkett and Kate Braithwaite
Carnegie UK Trust Rural Programme
A Manifesto for
Rural Communities
Inspiring Community Innovation

18
As capitals approaches have evolved, they have
attempted to tackle this reality. For example, some CoP
members are experimenting with a ‘seven capitals’ assets
approach originally developed by
Cornelia Flora and colleagues at
the North Central Regional Centre
for Rural Development, Iowa State
University:
Based on their analyses of entrepreneurial
communities, they determined that the
communities that were successful in
supporting healthy sustainable community
and economic development (CED) paid
attention to seven types of capital: natural,
cultural, human, social, political, financial
and built… this approach focuses on the
interaction among these seven capitals and
how they build upon one another… evaluators
can trace how an investment in human capital,
for example leadership training, might impact
financial capital as leaders use their skills to
acquire new funds and better manage existing
funds. Social capital may then be impacted
as members of the leadership program
develop new bonds among themselves and
new bridges among the groups with whom
they interact. The same leadership course
might consequently expand political capital by
providing information about how the political
system works and how to access resources
within the community; it could also help
participants develop key
linkages to other sources
of political power.
Some practitioners infer from Flora et al.’s seven capitals
model that community resilience relates directly to
building circles of virtuous activity between these seven
capitals. This is an example of how this theory can help
to simplify the everyday ‘mess’ of community action in
ways that help to sharpen resolve and steel nerves in
order to keep going through what can seem like daunting
challenges. The framework can also be useful
for professionals deciding how and when to respond to
requests for support by local leaders. As more and more
practitioners report on their experiments using ‘seven
capitals’ approaches, we will be better able to guage how
effectively this approach supports resilience outcomes.
Another source of inspiration founded in systems thinking
cited often by resilience pioneers is a well established
approach to community and agricultural design called
permaculture. Australians Bill Mollison and David
Holmgren are widely regarded as founding this movement
through a series of publications in the 1970s:
Today, permaculture
is a flourishing
and well established field. Evidence of its influence and
reach is clear through the fast-growing Transition Towns
movement, which emerged out of the work of a group of
permaculture students tutored by Rob Hopkins in Kinsale,
Ireland. David Holmgreen’s ‘Permaculture Principles’
internet site is a good resource for beginners – and also
uses a ‘petal’ metaphor to communicate this sophisticated
approach:
Flora, C.B. and
J.L. Flora. 2008.
Rural Communities:
Legacy and Change.
(3rd Edition) Boulder,
CO: Westview Press.
Quoted direct from
http://www.soc.iastate.
edu/staff/cflora/ncrcrd/
capitals.html
http://www.permaculture.org.uk
http://permacultureprinciples.
com/flower.php
Land
Nature
Stewardship
Building
Tools and
Technology
Education
Culture
Health and
Spiritual
Well-being
Finances
Economics
Land
Tenure
Community
Governance
David Holmgren’s
‘permaculture flower’
Ethics
Design
Principles

19
Permaculture (Permanent Agriculture) is
the conscious design and maintenance of
agriculturally productive ecosystems which
have the diversity, stability, and resilience
of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious
integration of landscape and people providing
their food, energy, shelter, and other material
and non-material needs in a sustainable way.
Without permanent agriculture, there is no
possibility of a stable social order…
The philosophy behind permaculture is one of
working with, rather than against nature; of
protracted and thoughtful observation rather
than protracted and thoughtless action; of
looking at systems in all their functions rather
than asking only one yield of them; and of
allowing systems to demonstrate their own
evolutions.
Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual
Systems thinking is not confined to any one discipline or
practical field. Instead, it has evolved in many different
fields. Early pioneers include Kurt Lewin who famously
said that ‘if you want
to truly understand
something, try to change
it’, and applied systems
thinking principles
to developing a new
approach to research –
‘action research’. It was
also systems thinking
that gave academics the
tools to begin to think
rigorously about what
makes systems ‘resilient’
in the face of change.
An early pioneer was
Canadian ecologist
Crawford Stanley
Buzz’ Holling who, in
1973, applied the term
‘resilience’ to describe
how forests persist
through cycles of change.
His paper challenged
forest management orthodoxy with a deceptively
simple message:
For most of the time, Holling observed, a forest matures at
a slow pace. However, as the forest ages, young trees are
crowded out and species diversity dwindles. This makes
the forest increasingly vulnerable to shocks, to the point
when it can ‘snap’ as (for example) a fire rips through at
speed. However, such fires (when not lit by humans) are
part of the natural cycle and perform vital regenerative
functions: as the old wood
burns up, dormant seeds
germinate and receive
light from new shafts of
sunlight that reach the
forest floor once more. The
forest is resilient by virtue
of this cycle of continuous
renewal.
The lesson was that forest managers needed to learn how
to recognise phases of stability, increasing brittleness,
and then rapid change – and to work with them. We can
sum up the lesson as: if you ‘work with nature, rather than
against her’, then the system will be naturally resilient. In
recent years, ecologists had undertaken enough research
to begin to propose how lessons from natural systems
might be transferable to human systems, too. To support
this work, they propose definitions of resilience which
tend to stress the capacity of a system or organisation to
evolve without losing its core sense of identity or purpose:
1 the amount of change a system can undergo and still
remain coherent;
2 the degree to which the system is capable of self-
organisation; and
3 the degree to which the system expresses capacity
for learning and adaptation. (Carpenter et al. 2001,
Walker et al. 2002, Folke 2006).
International agencies have gone on to build on this work,
including the United Nations International Strategy for
Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) which defines resilience as:
The capacity of a system, community or
society potentially exposed to hazards to
adapt, by resisting or changing in order
to reach and maintain an acceptable
level of functioning and structure. This is
determined by the degree to which the social
system is capable of organising itself to
increase its capacity for learning from past
disasters for better future protection and to
improve risk reduction measures.
Lewin proposed that action
research involves “a spiral
of steps, each of which is
composed of a circle of
planning, action, and fact-
finding about the result of the
action” (Lewin 1946). Action
research attempts to embody
democratic values, and
emphasises practical action
toward beneficial outcomes
in the future. For an excellent
overview of the field, see
http://www.bath.ac.uk/carpp/
publications/pdf/handbook_
of_action_research.pdf
There is a lot of excellent
material on the website of the
Stockholm Institute http://
www.stockholmresilience.
org and the Resilience
Alliance network http://www.
resalliance.org, including
interviews with Holling and
many academic reports on
resilience in socio-economic-
ecological systems.
Look at the 2008 Volvo
prize video, summing up
Buzz Holling’s contribution
to resilience thinking at
http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=XX5qJaJDjSs . His
1973 paper was: Holling, C. S.
1973. Resilience and stability of
ecological systems. Annu Rev
Ecol Syst 4:1-23.

20
Resilience: self-organisation
through diversity, modularity
and feedbacks
An early example of
applying resilience thinking
to human systems is the
work of Donella Meadows
(1941-2001) and colleagues
who wrote a report called
‘Limits to Growth’ (1972) –
one of the first examples
of computers being used
to model future scenarios
of population growth and
resource depletion on the
planet. The Limits to
Growth report originally
caused a stir because its
‘World3’ model, based on
12 scenarios using data
from 1900 to 2100,
predicted catastrophic ‘overshoot’ (human activity growing
too big too fast) of the earth’s capacity to sustain human
civilisation. Today, there is much in the media about what
happens when ecosystems
are pushed beyond
‘tipping point’ – and many
people are recognising
the connections between
the over-exploitation of
fisheries, mines, forests,
the collapse of rural
economies, and the social
shocks that follow.
In the 1970s this way of thinking was still in its infancy and
the early ecologists struggled to broadcast their findings.
Meadows’ response was
to start a regular column
in her local newspaper.
In one article, she wrote:
The ability to self-organise is the
strongest form of system resilience.
A system that can evolve can survive
almost any change, by changing itself…
insistence on a single culture shuts down
learning and cuts back resilience.
Fast-forward nearly forty
years, and Resilience
Scientists are becoming
increasingly well resourced
and influential. Stockholm’s
Resilience Institute
works with governments,
international agencies and
others, and a number of authors have begun to translate
complex systems ideas for lay audiences.
In their book Resilience Thinking, Walker and Salt
(2006: 121) draw attention to three key aspects of any
system’s resilience: diversity, modularity and tightness of
feedbacks:
Diversity
The more diverse a system is, the
more capacity it has to withstand
shock – because there are more
options available to fall back on.
Many people intuitively understand
this principle, captured by the phrase ‘don’t put all your
eggs in one basket’, or the idea of a ‘buffer’.
Mathematicians have used network theory to define
resilience as made up of two key variables – diversity
and interconnectivity. In a paper applying this thinking to
explain why the global financial system remains instable
following the 2007 credit crunch, economist Bernard
Lietaer describes resilience as the opposite of ‘efficiency’:
The process of
understanding how things
influence one another
within a whole. In nature,
systems thinking examples
include ecosystems in which
various elements such
as air, water, movement,
plants, and animals work
together to survive or
perish. In organisations,
systems consist of people,
structures, and processes
that work together to make
an organisation healthy
or unhealthy. http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Systems_thinking
In 1992, the team wrote
a twentieth anniversary
update called Beyond the
Limits, which presented new
evidence that by the early
1990s human civilisation
had already ‘overshot’ the
natural limits of many of
earth’s life-support systems.
Ten years later, Limits to
Growth: The 30Year Update
suggested the process of
break-down, or ‘collapse’,
had begun as spirals of
over-extended resource
use, accelerating loss of
species, poverty and climate
change connect and feed
off each other. See http://
www.mnforsustain.
org/meadows_limits_
to_growth_30_year_
update_2004.htm
http://www.sustainer.org/
meadows/
See for example the
End of the Line – a
powerful film that spells
out the consequences of
over-fishing:
http://endoftheline.com/
After her death, colleague
Diana Wright edited
together Thinking in
Systems: a primer (available
from Amazon); including
highlights of articles such
as her invitation to ‘dance
with systems’ available at
http://www.sustainer.org/
pubs/Dancing.html
See, for example, A Tale
of Two Fisheries at http://
www.pcdf.org/meadows/
twofisheries.html

21
“In general, a system’s resilience is enhanced
by more diversity and more connections,
because there are more channels to fall back
on in times of trouble or change. Efficiency,
on the other hand, increases through
streamlining, which usually means reducing
diversity and connectivity… Because both are
indispensable for long-term sustainability
and health, the healthiest flow systems are
those that maintain
an optimal balance
between these two
opposing pulls”.
In the same paper, Lietaer proposes that the ‘optimal
balance’ is found when resilience is valued about twice
as highly as efficiency.
This is not an abstract point. When business or
government goes for ‘greater efficiency’ by cutting ‘waste’,
there is the danger that longer term sustainability will be
undermined. For example, The Scotsman newspaper
reported on 16 February 2011 that campaigners fear
that cuts to the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA)
were implemented before the risks of these cuts were
adequately understood. One of the threatened services
are tug-boats. The campaigner’s concern is that without
enough spare tugs, do risks of a major environmental
disaster from a tanker oil spill increase dramatically?
For the sake of short-term efficiency, could the resilience
of marine ecosystems (and communities relying on the
health of the seas for their sustainability) suffer? The April
2010 Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico spill underlines
these questions.
A New Economics Foundations’ 2008 booklet Nine
Meals from Anarchy applies the same principle to take on ‘just
in time’ practices that supermarkets employ to stock food:
“Imagine that the the petrol stations ran dry. The trucks would
stop rolling. The supermarket
shelves would be bare within
three days. We would be nine
meals away from anarchy.”
Food campaigners make other,
related points, such as the importance of retaining diversity
and distinctiveness in town centres. Without small shops and a
unique sense of identity that comes from having pride in a local
place, it’s that much harder to build a resilience local economy.
Modularity
This principle is about ensuring that if
one part of a system breaks, it doesn’t
bring everything else down with it.
The Centre for Alternative Technology
(CAT) at Machynlleth, Wales has long
pioneered leading edge renewable
technologies. During 2010, CAT ran a series of seminars
on how to create a Zero Carbon Britain. One contributor,
Gunna Olsen of the European International Network for
Sustainable Energy (INFORSE) spelled out the importance
of ‘modularity’ by explaining Denmark’s strategy for
creating a distributed or
‘cellular’ energy grid:
cells in the grid can, if necessary, be separated
from the rest of the grid… the idea is, where
it’s difficult to restore the full grid [after a
system crash], you can just keep all those cells
that happen to be in balance at the time of
the crash staying working… and then quickly
restore the rest of the system…
Gunna Olsen, INFORSE
As with diversity, we can apply the ‘modularity’ idea to look
again at many things communities take for granted today.
For example, continuing with our food example –
depending on only a few supermarkets to supply the
vast majority of a nation’s food (each reliant on very long
supply lines) might suggest greater food vulnerability than
many people realise – especially as climate change and
speculation begin to have real impacts on commodity prices.
Feedback
As an aspect of resilience,
feedback means being able to
quickly see and understand the
consequences of our actions.
If you’re learning to drive a car, and steer too hard right,
you immediately realise the mistake and take corrective
action. But you may not also see the consequences of
the carbon dioxide that is coming out of the exhaust – in
this case, the feedback will take a long time to register, if
it registers at all. In a sixty-second public information film
‘Tomorrow’s Climate – Today’s Challenge’ released in 2005,
the UK government Department for Environment
http://www.lietaer.com/
images/White_Paper_on_
Systemic_Bank_Crises_
December.pdf http://www.inforse.org/
http://www.
neweconomics.org/
publications/nine-meals-
anarchy

22
Food and Rural Affairs
attempted to ‘tighten’
this carbon dioxide
feedback loop. The
script reads “if we
could see the gasses, the causes of the problem would be
obvious” – whilst the images make visible greenhouse gas
emissions spewing from planes, factories and cars.
Today, ‘smart meters’ that show us the electricity we
are using and its cost operate on the same principle.
Resilience depends on ‘tight’ feedbacks: that is, systems
that are able to learn quickly from good information. The
assumption is that the further away (in time or space or
both) from the impacts of a decision, the greater the risk
that a system’s resilience will be diminished. As Michael
Shuman, author of ‘Going Local’, argues, “a guaranteed
way to ensure that a car does not pollute is to stick the
exhaust pipe into the passenger section. Similarly, a
community committed to self-reliance will be mindful not
to foul its own nest” (1998: 49).
1.4 The politics of localisation: addressing the resilience imperative?
Shocks can act as wake-up calls, shaking us out of
our habitual ‘silos’ as we come together to search for
solutions to newly revealed challenges as well as existing
thorny issues. For example, the aftermath of the 2007
credit crunch opened new kinds of spaces where policy
makers and practitioners are asking how to build a more
sustainable economy. The new politics of ‘localisation’,
shared across major political parties, is one result.
As asset-based pioneers already know, local knowledge
can lead to better local decisions – especially when a full
range of local voices can participate in decision-making.
Likewise, for policy makers sceptical about the efficacy
of top-down decision making by a ‘nanny state’, thinking
about the importance of tight feedback in systems can
reinforce a view that local decisions are more likely to
result in better outcomes.
This section looks briefly at how today’s policy makers are
starting to address a ‘community resilience’ agenda.
Local communities facing
Global Risks
Anything that helps us reflect and
look at what we’re doing is going to
be helpful … in particular, looking
into whatever the future might be
Community activist interviewed at Sense of
Place,Carnegie UK Trust sponsored Community
of Practice event, 2010
Can we cope with the demands in the
future on water? Can we provide enough
energy? Can we do it, all that, while
mitigating and adapting to climate change?
John Beddington, the UK government’s chief scientific
adviser, speaking on 24 August 2009
As we have listened to Community of Practice and heard
in depth about Cumbria’s responses to flood events, it has
become clear that people in communities the length and
breadth of the UK and Ireland (and beyond) are already
grappling with the opportunities and challenges of times of
rapid change.
Although there are those who
maintain that climate change
is yet to be proven, or that a
return to ‘business as usual’
growth is both possible and
desirable following the global
credit crunch, many others are
taking very seriously evidence
of a raft of extraordinary
new risks to community and
national wellbeing into the
future. The three most cited
risks are the impacts arising
from global shortages of resources including oil, runaway
http://www.nationalarchives.
gov.uk/films/1979to2006/
filmpage_climate.htm
FierySpirits Community of Practice
is activists, practitioners and policy
makers building more resilient
communities (www.fieryspirits.com)
For an entertaining 300 second animation about peak oil see http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=cJ-J91SwP8w. In November 2010, the International
Energy Agency (IEA) published its World Energy Outlook report 2010: “The
oil price needed to balance oil markets is set to rise, reflecting the growing
insensitivity of both demand and supply to price… if governments act more
vigorously than currently planned to encourage more efficient use of oil and the
development of alternatives, then demand for oil might begin to ease soon. As
a result, we might see a fairly early peak in oil production, which would help
prolong the world’s oil reserves.” See http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/
docs/weo2010/WEO2010_ES_English.pdf page 6. Critics argue that the IEA
figures over-estimate reserves and impacts significantly.
See, for example, the New
Economics Foundation’s
Great Transition project
http://www.neweconomics.
org/projects/the-great-
transition – “we must
re-engineer our economies
to tackle debt fuelled over-
consumption, accelerating
climatic instability and volatile
energy prices underpinned
by the approaching peak in
global oil production. It means
re-thinking how we bank,
generate energy, travel, and
grow the food we depend on.”

23
climate change, and perhaps most fundamentally for the
ecological health of our planet, the continuing acceleration
of species loss (biodiversity).
In August 2009, UK chief
scientist John Beddington
warned that all these issues
are inter-connected. Climate
change, he said, is amplifying
a ‘perfect storm’ of rapidly
escalating food, water and
energy costs: ‘tipping points’
in the earth’s climate system
mean that it is becoming
increasingly likely that future changes will be large and
abrupt, rather than slow and gradual as many people
imagine. Beddington’s speech echoed key insights that
have emerged about the nature of change in natural
systems that have emerged in recent years from the field
of resilience science:
Sometimes change is gradual and things
move forward in roughly continuous and
predictable ways. At other times, change
is sudden, disorganising and turbulent ….
Evidence points to a situation where periods
of such abrupt change are likely to increase
in frequency and magnitude. This challenges
the adaptive capacity of societies.
Stockholm Resilience Centre, What is Resilience?
Periods of such turbulence
are, it seems, already
becoming normal. For
example, during a very
short period in the early
winter of 2010,
French protestors
blockaded fuel
supplies in protest
at Sarkozy’s
pension reforms;
voters in the
US mid-term
elections
returned ‘Tea
Party’ candidates angry at all
existing politicians; the UK coalition government faced
growing union and student militancy; and crowds
gathered in front of Ireland’s parliament furious that the
Government support for the Irish banks had resulted
in losing control of the Irish economy to the IMF and
European bankers. As the winter of 2010/11 progressed,
we witnessed epic climate-related floods of Queensland,
Sri Lanka and Pakistan’s Swat Valley. And then, following
the catastrophic Tsunami off Japan’s North East coast
in March 2011, events in Fukushima reminded the world
of the potential consequences of the bargain that energy
hungry economies have struck with nuclear power.
2010 was the hottest year ever recorded, with catastrophic
flooding across swathes of China and Pakistan and increasing
resource conflicts in Africa: surviving rapid, abrupt change is
already the day to day experience of the majority of people
living in poverty in rich and poor countries alike. As pressures
increase on states, survival becomes harder. Internationally,
the coal-face of resilience work is undertaken by international
emergency relief organisations, such as Action Aid, Oxfam,
World Vision and United Nations agencies such as the
UN Development Programme and the UN Environment
Programme – see for example http://www.unep.org/
climatechange/UNEPsWork/Adaptation/tabid/241/
Default.aspx
In Nagoya in October
2010, delegates from
193 countries met
under the auspices
of the United Nations
to agree to put under
protection 17 percent of
land and 10 percent of
oceans by 2020 to stop
the loss of plant and
animal diversity in their
ecosystems.
See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8213884.stm. See
also Thomas Homer-Dixon’s (Centre for International
Governance Innovation Chair of Global Systems at
the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo,
Canada) work on simultaneously catastrophic
collapse, eg. http://www.theupsideofdown.com/ ,
and the video output of FEASTA’s 2009 conference
New Emergency Conference: Managing Risk and
Building Resilience, at http://vimeo.com/feasta/
videos. It is likely that international reports – such
as that of the IPCC – significantly under-report the
scale and speed of the global crisis. For example,
Reuters reported in 2009 that a member of the IPCC
told an American Association for the Advancement
of Science meeting in Chicago that, due to the
unpredictable nature of climate feedback loops
(making them difficult to prove and therefore report),
“the actual trajectory of climate change is more
serious” than any of the climate predictions in the
IPCC’s fourth assessment report in 2007.
This tipping point (or ‘threshold’) science means that the earth’s
climate system may rapidly ‘flip’ into a state that will make it
impossible to bounce back to ‘normal’. Instead, as Jim Lovelock
has observed in Revenge of Gaia, the earth’s ‘new normal’ may
be uninhabitable for much of humanity. Ice core samples from
the North Pole prove that the earth has ‘flipped’ in this way
before (See IPCC, 2007; UNDP, 2007; and Stern, 2007).
There is an excellent
introductory video
about ecological
resilience available
from http://www.
stockholmresilience.org
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
commentisfree/2010/
aug/05/pakistan-floods-
failure-state

24
During the autumn of 2010, however, another kind of story
had caught the attention of the world’s media. For 69 days,
thirty-three miners awaited rescue deep in the bowels of a
Chilean mine. Video technology gave us a unique glimpse
into their experience and coping strategies. Then, on
14th
October, tens of millions watched as a subterranean
pod shuttled each man to the surface in turn. When the
final miner, Luis Urzua, stepped free, President Sebastian
Pinera captured something of meaning of the moment:
“We had strength, we had spirit, we wanted to fight, we
wanted to fight for our families, and that was the greatest
thing…You are not the same, and the country is not the
same after this.” Had the Chilean mine rescue resonated
because it touched something of the spirit of resilience of
human beings everywhere? Did the international media
pick up on the story with such passion because surviving
in the face of tough odds speaks to something of the spirit
of our age?
A new politics of leadership and
localisation
We believe there is a great deal of latent talent,
knowledge, ability and willingness in people
to improve their communities that is currently
not being used. The Government has a key
role in unlocking this talent.”
Building resilient communities – From idea to sustainable
action, Risk and Regulation Advisory Council
Just a week before the rescue in the Atacama Desert,
David Cameron had attempted his own Pinera moment
at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham.
Cameron’s rallying cry was for a ‘Big Society’ where
people everywhere pull together. He talked of austerity as
a time of opportunity as well as challenge, the opportunity
for entrepreneurs of all kinds to escape from the barriers
of red tape and suffocating bureaucratic restrictions on
innovation. “We need to change the way we think about
ourselves, and our role in society”, Cameron announced
to the hall of Tory stalwarts. Fellow proponents of this
thinking, such as Philip Blond of think-tank Respublica,
have called for a major shift in the relationship between
citizens and their state:
The welfare state nationalised society
because it replaced mutual communities
with passive fragmented individuals whose
most sustaining relationship was not with his
or her neighbour or his or her community
but with a distant and determining centre….
this ‘benefits culture’ can be tied directly to
the thwarting of working class ambition by a
middle class elite that formed the machinery
of the welfare state, yes to alleviate poverty,
but also to deprive the poor of their irritating
habit of autonomous organisation…. This new
civil state will turn itself over to its citizens; it
will foster the power of association and allow
its citizens to take it over rather as it had
originally taken over them.
Phillip Blond, The Future of Conservatism (speech)
It is clear that a ‘localisation’ agenda
has implications across the full
range of government
activity – including resilience
and emergency planning.
In October 2010 the UK
government published its
latest national security review
– ‘Securing Britain in an Age
of Uncertainty’. In the forward,
Coalition leaders David
Cameron and Nick Clegg
proposed to be “more
thoughtful, more strategic and more coordinated in the
way we advance our interests and protect our national
security”. Their conclusions chimed closely with those
in a Draft Strategic National Framework on Community
Resilience (2010), published by a previous UK Cabinet
Office taskforce which called for the formation of “local
Community Emergency Groups or using existing
community networks and structures to engage with
local emergency responders to ensure a co-ordinated
response”.
http://www.respublica.org.uk/
articles/future-conservatism-0
Download this readable short report from the
Talent and Enterprise Taskforce UK site:
http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file52720.pdf
http://www.direct.gov.uk/
prod_consum_dg/groups/
dg_digitalassets/@dg/@en/
documents/digitalasset/
dg_191634.pdf

25
In practice, emergency services, local and national
government planners, and voluntary groups are
increasingly working to develop emergency response
strategies fit for scenarios from terrorist attacks to flu
pandemics to coastal flooding to extreme snow events.
As our inquiries have
developed, however, we
have heard many local
voices suggesting that
we have a long way
to go. They identified
a ‘resilience deficit’:
how many emergency
planning groups have adequately factored in the impacts
of escalating oil prices? Where are local ‘transition town’
groups working in close partnership with the emergency
services? And in our age of austerity, how do we resource
ourselves to take steps to mitigate the future impacts of
economic, social and environmental change?
In Resilient Nation, DEMOS
suggested that ‘nudge’
economics might help –
reflecting a wider swing
toward ‘nudge’ thinking across public policy circles. The
idea is to give people choices in a way that ‘helps’ us to
make better decisions than we’d have otherwise opted for:
Nudges allow central government, local
authorities, emergency planning officers
and the emergency services to influence
public behaviour – a fundamentally
important task in making society more
resilient. Nudges also help readdress
the imbalance between management by
institution and public expectation. By
shifting some of the responsibility of
resilience planning and management
to communities
and individuals,
institutions
can focus on the most
vulnerable people.
Nudge thinking is fast becoming standard issue in UK
government policy circles – there is even a Behavioural
Insight Team established at Downing Street, applying the
thinking across many areas of government – beginning
notably with public health (obesity, diet and alcohol policy).
DEMOS has reported
that local authorities are
beginning to apply nudge
thinking in relation to
emergency planning. For
example, North Norfolk District Council wanted to prevent
residents from over-ordering sand-bags in advance of
flood risks – too many people were inappropriately stock-
piling them to protect gardens and outbuildings. This led
to an unsustainable demand for the bags, and the risk
that the bags would disintegrate come the actual floods
because they degenerate over time. According to DEMOS,
the Council’s decision to charge £2.50 for each bag
beyond the first six delivered constituted an example of a
‘nudge’ in the right direction.
Nudge thinking has helped to fuel a wider critique
of conventional approaches to policy making that
have tended to propose more top-down, target-
driven interventions – sometimes with perverse and
unforeseeable impacts. For example, economist John Kay
expounds on this shift through advocating for what he
calls ‘oblique’ approaches:
In complex systems the blind watchmaker may
be more effective than the sighted one. The ant
colony is a social and economic organisation of
subtlety and complexity, and no one planned
it. Small children judge the size and speed of
an approaching object with an accuracy that
complex optics and computers find hard to
emulate. If there is a one-line explanation of
the power of obliquity, it would be: ‘Evolution
is smarter than you are.’
John Kay, Obliquity, 2010:139
In England, the Environment
Agency has online
interactive maps which
reveal risks of flooding in
different locations: http://
www.environment-agency.
gov.uk/homeandleisure/
floods/31650.aspx
http://www.cabinetoffice.
gov.uk/news/behavioural-
insight-team-launches-
health-report
Download from www.
demos.co.uk/publications/
resilientnation
At www.nudges.org,
Richard Thaler and Cass
Sunstein update their
influential book Nudge:
Improving Decisions
About Health, Wealth, and
Happiness. This approach
is not without its critiques,
however – see for example
http://blogs.independent.
co.uk/2010/11/08/
it%E2%80%99s-time-to-
give-nudge-the-elbow/

26
Kay is drawing on the field of complexity thinking – which
shows how many individuals can act together for the
greater good – especially if that co-operation is guided by
an agreed set of working principles and sense of common
purpose. The message is that ‘complexity’ can turn out to
be a much simpler way to achieve policy outcomes that
older command-and-control approaches: instead of the
need for gate-keepers in communities or in key positions
in organisations of any size, the leadership role becomes
one of enabling collective innovation through many
personal actions focused in favour of collective goals.
A new policy language of ‘wicked issues’ has developed
to describe areas where complexity approaches may
offer fresh hope. Building community resilience might
be understood to be one such wicked issue: community
development workers have long recognised that on-
the-ground work is always ‘messy’ and requires special
leadership qualities if people are to be well supported
in taking collective charge of a community’s future
(and constructively addressing conflicts in the process).
Seamus Boland of Irish Rural Link succinctly summarised
this in one session:
The question really is how do you manage a
system where leaders are active, where they
are in tune with the knowledge and are in tune
with the solutions?
Seamus Boland, Irish Rural Link (speaking at Kendal)
The leadership challenge is sometimes described as being
able to switch easily between seeing the big picture and
getting on with day to day tasks:
Once you have got a picture in your mind …
you can then start working towards it … but if
you don’t know what it is that you are trying to
create you are just stumbling forward…
Hugh McLean, Atlantis Leisure, speaking at
Carnegie Rural Convention, Kendal November 2009
Similarly, many others have advocated that the most
effective community leaders are those who can are
humble in the face of uncertainty – and who are always
open to learning:
What’s appropriate when you’re learning
is small steps, constant monitoring, and a
willingness to change course as you find out
more about where it’s leading.
Meadows, Dancing with Systems, The Systems Thinker,
Vol. 13, No. 2 (March 2002)
Effective decision-makers are distinguished
not so much by the superior extent of their
knowledge as by their recognition of its
limitations. Problem solving is iterative and
adaptive, rather than direct.
John Kay, Obliquity: 9.
In a sister report to Resilient Nation, DEMOS took this
line pointed out how a growing number of activists and
academics are using the term ‘wicked issue’ as a short-hand
term for issues that can’t easily be solved by out-dated,
‘gate-keeper’ leadership. DEMOS’s definition of a ‘wicked
issue’ describes well the resilience challenges that many
communities face:
• The site of persistent (policy) failures;
• The source of profound disagreement – over what the
problems are, as well as over the improvements to be made;
• Unbounded in scope; the issues sprawl outwards and
interconnect with many other problems;
• Resistant to completion; wicked issues cannot be ‘solved’,
once and for all
• Complex, in the technical sense of being in principle
unpredictable.
Connecting the Dots – See http://www.demos.co.uk/
projects/connectingthedots

27
When one moves away from thinking that
one has to manage the whole system, one
pays attention to one’s own participation in
one’s own local situation in the living present.
Perhaps this humbler kind of ‘management’
is what the ‘knowledge society’ requires.
Ralph Stacey Complex Responsive Processes in
Organisations: 235
Today, professionals and activists are un-learning old gate-
keeper rigidities – and experimenting with how to live the
insight that ‘evolution is smarter than you are’ in practice.
Some, borrowing a phrase coined by Mahatma Gandhi,
emphasise that the key is to ‘be the change you want to
see in the world’. This is not usually a straightforward task
– often involving being open to personal development in
order to address old and sometimes quite stuck personal
and professional habits.
Julian Dobson, a founder of the ‘OurSociety’ social
network, has translated this insight for a public policy
audience: “Devolution starts with a state of mind: those
who take decisions in the usual places, surrounded by the
usual people, are highly unlikely to give us the unusual.
You can’t use a hierarchy to create a network.”
Such thinking – and preparedness to be open to personal
and professional development – can help practitioners
see more clearly the opportunities and risks presented by
an age of unprecedented change. Part Two of this book
illuminates some early findings from such experiments.
There are increasing links being made
between leadership development and
disciplines of meditation and yoga,
which offer training in becoming aware
of how ego can cloud good leadership
judgement and action, especially in
complex contexts.
Julian Dobson, founder of
OurSociety network http://www.
respublica.org.uk/blog/2011/02/
delivering-big-society
Section 1 – Facing into a
‘perfect storm’: resilience practice
and policy in times of rapid change
Summary Points
1 Community resilience is like a muscle which, when
exercised, builds both strength and flexibility.
2 Future social, economic and environmental disruptions
may well be bigger and faster than we imagine – a
‘perfect storm’.
3 Especially in turbulent times, civil society plays a vital
role examining the values underpinning local visions of
‘community resilience’.
4 Assets (strengths-based) approaches are core to
resilience building. There is much to learn from
international experience, community development.
5 The disciplines of systems thinking and social capital
underpin resilience thinking, stressing the importance
of feedback (trust learning), diversity (don’t put all
your eggs in one basket) and modularity (localised
infrastructure).
6 Policy makers are recognising resilience as a complex
‘wicked’ issue: dynamic, unpredictable and likely to
confound ‘command and control’ mindsets.
7 Funders can help by enabling local action researchers
to innovate together – and share their learning through
communities of practice. This is most effective
when people work together who wouldn’t normally
collaborate.

2.1 Introducing a ‘compass’ of community resilience
The terms ‘resilience’ and ‘vulnerability’ are
opposite sides of the same coin, but both
are relative terms. One has to ask what
individuals, communities and systems are
vulnerable or resilient to, and to what extent.
Characteristics of a Disaster-Resilient Community:
A Guidance Note, John Twigg for the DFID Disaster Risk
Reduction Interagency Coordination Group
Community resilience is a youthful and vibrant field.
People are constantly innovating and finding ways to
share these innovations. We have already flagged up
how Carnegie’s Rural Development Community of
Practice is one of many networks that enables people
to do this. Through a series of workshops and
conversations over two years, CoP participants have
challenged and supported each other to look more
deeply into what community resilience is all about
through questions such as:
. What are communities doing to build their resilience –
and does their action help others to do likewise?
. How can we tell if our hard work is having the
desired effect?
. When you boil it down, what is a resilient
community anyway?
In addition, community support organisations are
taking the next step and translating their on-the-ground
experience into manuals and toolkits. For example,
the Community for Community Enterprise in Canada
developed a comprehensive Community Resilience
Manual in 1999 and
in San Francisco,
Bay Localise actively
updates their own
Community Resilience
Toolkit. In Australia,
the federal
government’s
Social Inclusion
Board has published a booklet (2009) of principles which
defines resilient communities as “equipped to help
themselves and are also able to reach out and support
one another in times of crisis – this has been seen in the
recent Victorian bushfires”.
Similar work is underway
in the field of public
health – see for example
Davis and Cook’s ‘THRIVE’ tool,
introduced in their article ‘A
Community Resilience Approach
to Reducing Ethnic and Racial
Disparities in Health’. And the
Young Foundation have also recently developed a tool
that will be useful for local authorities called ‘WARM’
(‘Wellbeing and Resilience
Measurement’).
Pioneers are often regarded as mavericks by
mainstream society – until the value of their
foresight is recognised as times change. Despite
the difficult choices of times of austerity, investing
in resilience pioneers may prove vital in times to
come. Two examples from a different age illustrate
this point well:
Through the early 1930s, aircraft engineer R.J.Mitchell
doggedly pursued his vision for a superior fighter
plane, despite a failure to win investment from the
British Air Ministry. Eventually, he secured funding from
Vickers-Armstrongs to develop a prototype. The fact
that the prototype was available meant that when the Air
Ministry eventually realised that the Spitfire could offer
a crucial tactical advantage, production lines could be
established very quickly.
Winston Churchill’s own story is similar – for many
years, his warnings about Hitler were dismissed
as exaggerated – people preferred to believe that
Chamberlain’s Munich appeasement pact would stave
off war. The pact failed, Chamberlain was forced
to prepare for war, and Churchill was eventually
appointed Prime Minister on 9th May 1940. Biographers
have suggested that his unflinching self-belief and
phenomenal capacity for work were infectious, helping
the nation survive the Battle of Britain until the Russians
and USA brought relief the following year.
Available for download from:
http://www.climategovernance.org/theme_citizen.htm
http://www.socialinclusion.
gov.au/LatestNews/Pages/
BuildingCommunityResilience.
aspx
http://ajph.
aphapublications.
org/cgi/reprint/
AJPH.2004.050146v1.pdf
http://www.youngfoundation.
org/publications/reports/taking-
temperature-local-communities
This describes 23
characteristics of a resilient
community based on lessons
being learned by rural
communities in British Columbia
– http://www.cedworks.com/
communityresilience01.html
http://www.baylocalize.org/toolkit
28
2

All these resources offer up clues about how
communities might decide to measure their
resilience. In addition, during the development
of this book, we have noticed a growing number
of media and other organisations experimenting
with generating resilience indicators of their
own (for example, see box). Measurement is
important for several reasons – not least to
track and communicate progress locally and
to evidence bids for support from government
and other external agencies. However, as our
discussion in Part One has demonstrated,
resilience is a ‘wicked issue’ and is not easy to
pin down – it is probably best understood as a
function of an ever changing system. Particular
tools of sets of tick boxes may on occasion
be useful as guides for communities – but
maps are never the territory, especially when
navigating uncharted waters!
This is a favourite example of Paul
Allen, co-author of the significant
report Zero Carbon Britain from the
Centre for Appropriate Technology.
Paul compares Mitchell’s work with
the need to prepare today for the
coming impacts of peak oil.
For more on Churchill, see
Digby Jones and Prof.
David Reynolds interviewed
at http://www.bbc.co.uk/
programmes/b00tpsvk
29
Introducing
a ‘compass’
of community
resilience

30
As the Community of Practice resilience inquiry gathered
pace, the in-box started to overflow with toolkits, stories,
anecdotes and flashes of inspiration from workshops.
The challenge was how to create a simple route through
this material – which keeps in view the complex and
systemic nature of the topic?
Gradually, four themes emerged that connected
practitioner stories and key insights from a wide
resilience literature. This handbook therefore proposes
four key dimensions of community resilience building:
. Healthy people: supporting individuals’ physical and
psychological well-being;
. Inclusive, creative culture: generating a positive,
welcoming sense of place;
. Localised economy – within ecological limits: securing
entrepreneurial community stewardship of local assets
and institutions;
. Cross-community links: fostering supportive
connections between inter-dependent communities.
These themes can act as a navigation aid for practitioners wanting to steer a course towards resilient outcomes
for their community. Rather than heading in only one direction, however, the point is to connect initiatives in each
dimension – work in one area is likely to benefit and amplify that in another:
Authoritative literature
reviews including those by
Walker, Brian, Salt, David.
(2006) and Magis (2007).
Healthy Engaged People
“I’m happy and fit in mind and body”
Cross-community links
“We collaborate with other communities near
and far – we know no place can go it alone”
Inclusive, creative culture
“We’re confident in our diversity –
creating a great future together”
Localised economy
within ecological limits
“We steward our land, food, water,
energy, services, jobs, housing”

31
The islands Orkney
and Shetland were
amongst the top
ranked areas.
Different BBC
regions reported
local results from
the survey – to find
the results for your
area, do a search of
the BBC news site.
For example, http://
www.bbc.co.uk/
news/uk-england-
lancashire-11199638Rob Hopkins, author of the Transition Towns Handbook, has recently completed a
doctorate where he looks in more detail at promising indicators emerging through
the experience of Transition Totnes and other initiatives (personal communication).
This picture looks a little like a compass – and the idea of a compass makes it easy to reveal an underlining
stance – or approach – that some of the most effective resilience pioneers seem to adopt:
Making it up as we go along:
For centuries, compasses have
given explorers added confidence
as they set off into the unknown.
A compass can point out a
general sense of direction, but the
adventurer has to decide whether
to climb over or walk around the
mountain.
Enabling everyone to work
together toward a common goal
The very first compasses were
invented in China during the Han
Dynasty (206BC-220AD). They didn’t
point North – but were used instead
by Feng Shui practitioners to assist
with bringing order and harmony to
buildings and places (see picture, left,
from Wikimedia commons). Resilience
practitioners are increasingly
recognising the importance of learning
skills in transforming community
conflicts to better enable everyone
to contribute to the bigger goal – of
working together to thrive through
turbulent times.
Having fun
Many of the best resilience stories
are about the times when people
were loving what they are doing
together. Although there is a fine
tradition of solo explorers bagging
Munros, conquering the Poles or
sailing single-handed around the
planet – most of us prefer to party
with friends along the way. Just
as Douglas Adams put the words
‘DON’T PANIC’ on the cover of his
Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
it seems that it would be a good
idea to put a sticker that says
‘HAVE FUN!’ on the back of the
compass.
Experian’s ‘resilience rankings’
In the run-up to the UK Government announcement of its comprehensive spending review of October 2010, the
BBC commissioned research company Experian to develop ‘resilience rankings’ comparing the potential economic
vulnerability of the 12 BBC regions (comprising 324 local authority districts). Experian took an approach that focused
on indicators designed to reveal the strength and adaptability of each area:
. Strength of local business base: for example, is it dominated by sectors hit by the recession
of those that are relatively unscathed such as agriculture, forestry and fishing, banking and
insurance? Have local firms and start-ups already proven their adaptability?
. Community vulnerability: for example, the percentage of households vulnerable to declines in disposable
income or to long term unemployment, alongside a survey question that asked of people “Do neighbours
look out for each other?”
. Personal vulnerability: for example, the size of the working age population, skills, average earnings and number
of professionals (managers) compared to low-skilled workers (such as labourers); and
. Place: for example, median house prices, local crime rates, and green space availability.
Experian must have deployed significant number-crunching power and professional expertise
to undertake such a study so quickly. It seems unlikely that local community initiatives had any
opportunity to help to design the research or define the indicators – but in an age when the
science of measuring resilience is still in its infancy, the investment by the BBC in the Experian
research indicates that in the future there may be good opportunities for local communities
to develop local media partnerships that would support the development and reporting of
resilience indicators that are genuinely owned by local people.

32
Describing the four dimensions of the compass – and
some principles that inform how resilience builders might
go about using it – misses a crucial part of the exploration
of what resilience actually is.
It is as if we have told an alien visitor to the planet about
the idea of ‘north, south, east and west’, offered them
a pair of hiking boots, but omitted to explain that the
compass needle points North because it follows the
earth’s magnetic field.
Where magnetism is the force that makes a navigational
compass work, knowing how to understand and navigate
change (or ‘change literacy’) is a core skill for any effective
community resilience practitioner.
Everyone is ‘change literate’ to a degree: over the course
of our lives, we get to know about our own patterns and
cycles – from feeling stuck and depressed to times when
there’s a skip in our step and we feel particularly energised
and alive. After living through a few of these cycles, it gets
easier to recognise that nothing is constant for very long –
that, as Heraclitus said thousands of years ago: ‘the only
constant is change’.
Evidence from our inquiries suggest that change literacy is
a skill that is worth honing. As one possible starting point,
this Handbook proposes getting to grips with three states
of change that communities can experience – ‘break
through’, ‘break even’ and ‘break down’. These can be
easily mapped onto the compass. In this way, local people
can begin to guage whether their community is becoming
more or less resilient over time.
2.2 Break Through, Break Even and Break Down:
three responses to change
Community resilience is … the existence,
development and engagement of community
resources to thrive in a dynamic environment
characterised by change, uncertainty,
unpredictability and surprise. Resilient
communities intentionally develop personal
and collective capacity to respond to and
influence change, to sustain and renew the
community and to develop new trajectories
for the community’s future.
Community Resilience: literature and practice review
(Magis 2007)
Part One introduced ecologist Buzz Holling’s work about
resilience in natural systems like forests. In his most recent
work, Holling and colleagues at the Stockholm Resilience
Institute have developed a sophisticated new resilience
model that they call ‘panarchy’. This work now integrates
human as well as natural systems83
. Significantly, the
model shows that systems can undergo ‘step change’
transformation to either much greater, or significantly less
resilience. This thinking lies behind the proposal in this
Handbook that communities experience (at least) three
kinds of change: break through transformation, break even
‘bounce back’, or break down collapse (see box).
‘The only constant is change’ is a saying attributed
to Heraclitus (c.535 BC – 475 BC), who also said that
‘everything flows, nothing stands still’ as well as introducing
the idea of ‘reason’ (‘logos’); in the East, the Chinese Book
of Changes (I Ching, dating back as far as 2800 BC) carries
the same principle into a powerful guide to chance and the
impermanence of life.
This definition was written as a
result of an exhaustive literature
survey for the US Forests’ Service in
2007. It helpfully integrates insights
from ecological systems thinking
and asset-based development.

33
Break through communities
A break through community anticipates and responds
to shocks by taking co-ordinated collective actions
toward a commonly agreed vision of a better future.
This is a little like a sports team whose sustained efforts
enables them to break through to the next league.
Another way to think about this is to imagine a master
juggler who has mastered the basics – and moved on
to try new, more complex tricks. From learning how
to ride a bicycle without stabilisers, to learning a new
language, many of us have experienced how, after
hours of practice, we might wake up one day and
succeed where we failed before. This book calls this
experience a step change: rather than being daunted
by the challenges, we seem to thrive. Some people call
this place of rapid learning a ‘learning edge’; others call
it an experience of ‘flow’.
Break even communities
Communities can often cope with disruptions and
bounce back to something approximating ‘normal’
after having learned important lessons about their
vulnerability – in this book, we call these ‘break even’
communities. There is often a groundswell of effective
co-operative action in these places, but it may not
have yet resulted in a step change towards significantly
greater resilience: break even communities cope
reasonably well day to day, but become vulnerable
if unexpected shocks come too thick or fast. People
in these communities could benefit from reassessing
their vulnerabilities – in other words, the risks they
face from local, national and global impacts, and the
communities’ likely capacity to be able to endure them.
These communities are like sports teams whose
performance has fluctuated through a season.
Retaining the confidence of a loyal fan base, they
avoid relegation.
Returning to the juggling analogy: from working mums
to volunteer directors of community organisations (and
they may be the same people), many of us know what
it means to try to keep all the balls in the air when there
are many competing demands…
‘Flow psychology’ is a fast developing field, part of the
positive psychology movement. For a good summary, see
Csikszentmihalyi M. The contribution of flow psychology
of positive psychology. In The science of optimism and
hope: research essays in honour of Martin P. Seligman.
Gilham JE. Philadelphia PA: Templeton Foundaiton Press
2000, pp387-95.

34
Communities at risk of break-down
Especially when one shock comes on top of another,
and often despite the best efforts of dedicated local
people, communities may need emergency support
from the outside to prevent break down.
Returning to the example of the sports team, if a club
suffers multiple, unexpected setbacks from injuries,
conflict in the boardroom or other misfortune, morale
can be sapped and a negative cycle can set in creating
more and more stress until things become ‘brittle’ and
can suddenly snap – and the club is then vulnerable to
bankruptcy or takeover.
The juggling analogy: If we’re over stressed by
attempting to juggle too many demands, we may be on
the road to burn-out or ‘dropping the ball’. It’s important
to ask for help before this happens – but the experience
of running faster and faster to keep up can make even
asking for help seem very hard.
It’s now possible to visualise these change categories
by overlaying them on the four compass dimensions
introduced earlier:
A break through community will be developing
strengths in and connections between each
dimension, expanding the size of the green
circle (the larger the circle, the more resilient
a community will be). A strength in one
dimension will likely open opportunities for
creative action in the others, too.
The orange and blue circles represent
decreasing flexibility, connectivity and
capacity to mitigate shocks. We could think of
these circles as different resilience zones.
Resilience theory suggests that shifting from
one zone to another takes either lots of effort or a
shock big enough to prevent ‘bounce back’ to the
existing state. Imagine a heavy iron ball – it has lots of
inertia, but once it starts rolling it’s really hard to stop:
Break
Down
Break
Even
Break
Through
shocks effort
People
Culture Economy
Links
Thriving
Coping
Depressed
Isolated
Networked
Fearful
Fragile
Stable
Enterprising
Secure
Creative
Inter-dependent

35
In the normal course of events, a moderate push on one of
the balls might disturb it a little, but won’t shift it out of its
dip (see diagramme, above). However, a big push in either
direction could roll it into the next-door dip.
In the sections that follow, bear these change dynamics in
mind. Each section brings one dimension of the compass
to life with real-life stories and literature references shared
by participants in the resilience inquiry.
If you’re keen to skip straight to seeing whether the
compass could be of some help in your place, there
are two appendices at the end of this book that might
be useful:
. Appendix 2 imagines a workshop session translating
these categories into the context of a local community;
and
. Appendix 3 shows how this thinking can be helpful
in planning the future sustainability of community
organisations.
2.3 Personal resilience: healthy, engaged people
How we weather those coming storms,
to me that’s what resilience is … it’s going
to be our ability to cope … so I put ‘personal
resilience’ as well …
Irish participant, Dunfermline Resilience seminar
The National Youth Agency’s Youth Work
Week in November 2009 focused on two key
qualities – Resilience and Resourcefulness.
This approach urged youth workers to
consider the factors that help children and
young people manage, cope and even thrive
in the face of adversity and disadvantage.
It recognises that personal development,
family support and community influence
positively impact on young people’s resilience,
their ability to bounce back from life’s
disappointments and setbacks and enable
them to achieve their full potential.
Bud Simpkin, CEO of Young
Suffolk
Deciding to live
Amid a continuing media frenzy, Edison Peña, one of the
rescued Chilean miners, ran in the November 2010 New
York Marathon. The Guardian reported that “for the first 18
days when he was trapped, he gave up hope, and curled
up, waiting for death. Yet once contact had been made
with the outside world and he believed life might continue,
he resumed his running, covering up to six miles a day
in the dark: ‘I ran to forget I was trapped … I became
two people: the weak person who wanted simply to give
up and the person who chose to be strong – to run and
survive. Eventually, I chose to live’”.
Peña’s experience is not unique. In a previous age, Victor
Frankl wrote and talked about his experiences of surviving
Nazi concentration camps:
Everything can be taken from a man or a
woman but one thing: the last of human
freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given
set of circumstances, to choose one’s own
way… Man does not simply exist but always
decides what his existence will be, what he
will become in the next
moment.
The idea of shifting from one zone or state to another is well
animated in Wake Up, Freak Out: http://wakeupfreakout.
org/film/tipping.html – which illustrates how our planet may
be on the verge of shifting from one climate-stable state to
another if 350ppm carbon dioxide is sustained for too long.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/
nov/07/chilean-miner-new-york-marathon
Victor Frankl, Man’s
Search for Meaning
(2004)
personal communication
from Bud Simpkin, Chief
Executive Young Suffolk

36
Michael Neenan, Developing Resilience: a cognitive-
behavioural approach (2010) Routledge. London. Page 3.
O’Connol Higgins,
quoted in Neenan
(ibid.) page 7.
National Office for Suicide
Prevention, Ireland Annual
Report (www.nosp.ie)
Published September 2010: 1
For example, Aaron Antonovsky is a Professor of
Medical Sociology who has gained recognition in
the field of personal resilience with his finding that
people who manage stress best tend to share three
characteristics: they can make sense of events, they
feel they can take care of things, and who really care
about what happens. (His ‘salutogenesis’ model is
outlined in his 1979 book Health, Stress and Coping).
Today, there is a wealth of research and practice on
helping people to develop and maintain personal
resilience. Some of it challenges the popular view
that resilience can be summed up with the phrase
‘bouncing back’:
Bouncing back suggests a rapid and effortless
recovery from adversity…. This might be the
ideal that some wish to aspire to, yet it seems
to be more of a comic-book view that may well
trigger self-depreciation (seeing oneself as
weak or inadequate) if this ideal is not realised
in times of crisis… imagine you have been
injured in an accident and now suffer from
chronic pain… ‘bouncing back’ suggests little
time for [a] slow process of adaptation and
discovery.
Others contrast ‘survival’ with ‘resilience’:
Unlike the term survivor, resilient emphasises
that people do more than merely get through
difficult emotional experiences, hanging on
to inner equilibrium by a thread. Because
resilience best captures the active process
of self-righting and growth
that characterises some
people so essentially [italics
in original]
Most importantly for our exploration of community
resilience in this book is that there is a growing consensus
amongst personal resilience experts that it’s by no means
only about individual actions – instead, we are learning
how it is our relationships that are critical for effective ‘self
righting’ (friends, family, community).
Social isolation, especially when combined with an
inability to cope with emotions or to make sense of events,
are important indicators of vulnerability. Reviewing
fifty years of resilience psychology in children, Masten
says that in the early days, some researchers thought
‘resiliency’ might be a trait that special people posses…
but that today, it is accepted that resilience is ordinary, not
extraordinary:
What began as a quest to understand the
extraordinary has revealed the power of the
ordinary. Resiliency does not come from rare
and special qualities, but from the everyday
magic of ordinary … minds, brains, and bodies
of children, in their families and relationships,
and in their communities.
Masten (2001:235)
Since 2007, Austerity measures in the Republic of
Ireland have resulted in job losses and other forms of
severe disruption for many people. Statistics on the Irish
suicide rate released in September 2010 already show an
increase of 24% over the previous year. Young men, as
with previous years, were shown to be disproportionately
at risk. Ireland’s National Office for Suicide Prevention
(NOSP) suggested that: “the impact of the economic
downturn in 2008, and particularly in 2009, has led
to substantial increases in both self harm and suicide
numbers.”
Mental health is about how you think and
feel and your ability to deal with ups and
downs. Your mental health does not always
stay the same. It can change as you move
through different life stages or in response to
difficulties in your life such as losing your job
or having money worries.

37
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/
capabilityandresilience/
index.htm
http://www.safh.org.uk/
safh_new/scripts/page/
home.php
Whilst figures such as those in the NOSP report represent
vital information for policy makers charged with making
difficult decisions about prioritising public sector spending,
and professional theories about resilience can be helpful
in targeting those most at risk, a focus on the numbers
or theory alone risks obscuring from view the scale,
breadth and power of the work happening every day
in communities on preventing personal tragedies from
becoming abstract statistics.
Relationships matter
Alongside the Samaritans and other help-lines, people are
supporting each other as an everyday part of community
life. We are all likely to find ourselves offering a friend
or family member help to survive dark days… and to
then learn how to cope with the after-effects. Our own
experiences of being similarly supported in the past can
help us, in turn, feel confident when stepping forward to
help others.
Healthy eating, keeping fit, drinking lots of water and
following a faith or meditation practice can significantly
enhance personal resilience. We know that regular
exercise really helps, too – whether it’s yoga, dance,
walking, cycling, running, swimming, surfing or climbing
the stairs instead of taking the lift. But the evidence
suggests that even the strongest, bendiest, most calorie-
controlled individuals rely on good friends and strong
relationships when times get tough.
A four-year study into ‘Capability and Resilience’,
published in 2007 by Professor Mel Bartley and
colleagues at the University College London Department
of Epidemiology and Public Health, affirmed “the
enormous capabilities and resilience that people already
show in their everyday lives and under crisis conditions“,
and underlined that “it is social relationships that are most
effective in maintaining resilience in the face of adversity”.
They concluded that resilience building needs to begin
by making “best use of the many assets for well-being
and social and economic
development that already exist
in communities”.
A good example of this approach is a ‘self-management’
programme run by Hackney-based Social Action for
Health (SAfH). Over six half days, lay people with long-
term conditions guide others in similar situations through
a course (involving action planning and group problem
solving activities) aimed at helping them come to terms
with the impacts on their lives and emotions. SAfH claims
that lay people are able to do this work “as effectively,
if not more effectively, than health professionals”. The
course also encourages participants to think about diet,
medication usage, exercise
and communication skills
as well as techniques for
relaxation and breathing
exercises.
Resilience in young people in
Brighton and Suffolk
Another area where personal resilience practice is very
well developed is in working with young people. In
Brighton, Professor Angie Hart and colleagues at the
Community University Practice Partnership (CUPP)
have been translating academic resilience concepts
to help build practical programmes that give hope to
disadvantaged children and families. Hart starts from a
definition of resilience as ‘bouncing back… and a little bit
more’, or
The kinds of things we need to make happen
(e.g. events, parenting strategies, relationships,
resources) to help children manage life when
it’s tough. Plus ways of thinking and acting
that we need ourselves if we want to make
things better for children.
Source: Aumann and Hart 2009
In practical terms, a network of support workers use ‘five
potions’ to guide conversations with children toward
enabling them to make good choices in their lives. The
potions focus on:
. basic security – such as ensuring access to ‘good
enough’ housing;
. belonging – for example, involving securing more
‘healthy relationships’;
. learning – such as ‘help the child organise her/himself’;
. coping – for example, ‘understanding boundaries’; and
. core self – involving, for example, affirming a ‘sense of
hope’.

38
www.wholeeducation.org
personal communication
from Bud Simpkin, Chief
Executive Young Suffolk
For more on El Sistema,
see http://www.
sistemascotland.org.uk/
There are, of course, many different ways of concocting
such potions. Community of Practice participant Bud
Simpkin of Young Suffolk emphasises how important
shifts in school curriculums, already underway, hold the
promise of sowing resilience skills in children from their
earliest years. However, he adds that it’s not just the
curriculum that needs to change – as society becomes
more concerned about issues of resilience in the round,
we might need to think deeply about the whole balance
between informal and formal approaches to learning:
In addition to the informal education
setting of Youth Work, the Whole Education
movement teaches
social and emotional
competence as well as developing the capacity
of individuals to collaborate and forge
strong relationships with each other. This
is considered to be a fundamental aspect
of a new curriculum that focuses on a well
rounded education combining practical skills
with theory, vocational with academic and
steers away from a “passing exams” mentality
for education.
At the heart of the work of Young Suffolk is a focus on
developing young peoples’ self-esteem and confidence.
Why is it that so many young people growing up in such
a sophisticated society find it difficult to make good life
choices? Bud suggests that young people today have
fewer opportunities to hone their decision-making skills
than in the past.
This is where initiatives such as the Duke of Edinburgh’s
Award, The Princes Trust and the new coalition
Government plans for a National Citizen Service can
help. These programmes can enable young people to
experiment, take risks and make mistakes in supervised
settings. They help young people to take responsibility
for their actions, and to learn how to work co-operatively
and collaboratively – the core skills of any community
resilience worker!.
A Big Noise in Stirling
In Raploch, Stirling, Scotland a new music initiative is a very
practical example for how innovations in almost any field
can help to create more resilient people. The idea behind
‘El Sistema’ began in Venezuela in 1975, when young
musicians from Caracas and the interior of the country
came together to form the first National Symphony Youth
Orchestra of Venezuela. By 2008, El Sistema’s philosophy
of “passion first/refinement second” had enabled more than
400,000 disadvantaged children to join over 130 orchestras.
Inspired by this approach to mass participation in collective
creative expression, El Sistema was established in Scotland
with the support of grants from the Scottish Arts Council
in 2008 (in Venezuela, El Sistema is resourced through the
State Foundation for the National System of Youth and
Children’s Orchestras of Venezuela). Going under the name
‘Big Noise’, it has begun working with children in Raploch,
Stirling and quickly achieved publicity from papers and the
notice of decision makers. Chair of El Sistema, Richard
Holloway, summarised the approach in a speech at No.11
Downing Street:
By recruiting children and immersing
them in orchestras, we can slowly, year
upon year, build them into something
stronger and greater and more enduring
than the despair that surrounds them.
They learn discipline, they experience joy,
they co-operate passionately with each other
to create excellence,
and a wonderful
beauty is born.
Friday Feast, Falkland

39
See http://www.
neweconomics.org/
publications/five-ways-
well-being-evidence
Enjoying a ‘Big Lunch’
We can see that there is already a huge amount of
work being undertaken in communities around building
personal resilience – whether it is for young people, those
recovering from illness or accidents or shocks such as
terrorist incidents, or others. All this work is crucial in
developing more resilient communities – but it may not be
sufficient. We are learning how to help (to quote running
miner Peña) individuals make choices to ‘run and survive’
rather than ‘giving up hope’. How do we come together to
exercise such a choice collectively?
The Big Lunch initiative shows how possible and fun it can
be. Big Lunch aims to ‘make isolation history’ by acting as
a “catalyst facing up to tough issues” of crime, domestic
violence, homelessness and children living in poverty. The
website illustrates with statistics that shows that in too
many places isolation has become the norm:
. Two million more single person households by 2019.
. More rich, poor and ethnic ghettos than ever before.
. 7% annual drop in trust between neighbours from
2003-05.
. Social trust in the UK halved and now is among the
lowest in Europe.
Source: www.thebiglunch.com
The idea is that every year people roll out the bunting and
hold a street party for their street with the idea that “when
doors open up, people open up and neighbourhoods
open up… we call this phenomenon ‘human warming’”.
We only knew our immediate neighbours
before. But at the end of it, we felt we had
a community spirit. Its a little bit like when
Christmas comes you can write a card to
every single neighbour in that street because
you actually know their names and their
children’s names.
Participant in 2010 Big Lunch, quoted in
http://www.mirror.co.uk June 29th
2010
The message from events like Big Lunch and the everyday
experience of communities where people already know
and trust each other is that by connecting with others we
feel more confident that we belong in a place… and more
ready to step forward to help others:
Thanks to the Big Lunch, I went from being
a normal(ish) 32 year-old-guy to being the
Chairman of a Residents Group/social
community group. How did that happen?
2010 Big Lunch organiser, quoted in
http://www.mirror.co.uk June 29th 2010
Mental health experts agree that getting out and getting
involved can be an excellent antidote to some forms of
depression. The Big Lunch is an excellent example of
how important it is that communities address loneliness.
No matter how individually fit, healthy or rich we are…
when we ‘open up’ and celebrate being part of a wider
community, benefits flow all round.
In 2008, the UK Government’s Foresight project on Mental
Capital and Wellbeing worked with the New Economics
Foundation’s to propose ‘five ways of well being’: connect,
be active, take notice, keep learning… and give. The is an
excellent resource for those wanting to dig deeper into the
evidence base behind the psychology of personal resilience:
The concept of well-being comprises two main elements:
feeling good and functioning well. Feelings of happiness,
contentment, enjoyment, curiosity and engagement
are characteristic of someone who has a positive
experience of their life. Equally important for well-being
is our functioning in the world. Experiencing positive
relationships, having some
control over one’s life and
having a sense of purpose
are all important attributes of
wellbeing.
Volunteer Cornwall is an organisation with a long track
record of working with over 1600 local groups (including
many people with physical and learning disabilities) in
this kind of work. Ian Jones, Volunteer Cornwall CEO, is
also a passionate resilience advocate. He reports how the
organisation is creating ‘virtual hubs’ where local people
– even those who are housebound – are able to connect
with services with the help of people who are visiting
their house anyway – such as a postman, handyperson or
shopping delivery driver. In order to get such a system up
and running, Jones describes how “the work is focused
on distributing leadership and not controlling what
happens”: the ethic of Volunteer Cornwall’s approach is
to enable people and organisations to work across ‘fuzzy
boundaries’ – breaking down the walls between the public,
private and voluntary sectors.

40
For a full review of
Microenterprise Best Practices
see Development Alternatives
briefing no. 3 at http://gdrc.org/
icm/disasters/bangladeshi_
experience_in_adapting_
financial_services.pdf
See for example the
‘Plugging the leaks’ at http://
www.pluggingtheleaks.org/
resources/plm_ptl.htm
2.4 Economy: towards enterprising self-reliance…
within energy and ecological limits.
Economic assessments, strategy, policy and
delivery have tended to work in isolation
from their social and environmental context.
Resilience allows us to think about the
broader palette of aspects that make a place
sturdy. In turn that enables us to assess a local
economy’s brittleness, its vulnerability and
weak points. This leads us to better develop
policy and action which fully considers a
locality’s power of recovery and understands
what can drive it.
Neil McInroy, New Start, January 2010
The drive to devolve power and responsibility to
individuals and communities is sometimes called ‘localism’
– a significant driver of policy innovation in our age of
austerity. For community activists, localism can be most
meaningful when it is connected with the idea of local
self-reliance – that is, where communities establish and
maintain control over their own, diversified economy,
thereby minimising exposure to external shocks.
In this way, communities are effectively localising their
economies – helping to ensure that money and savings
keep circulating through local shops and businesses rather
than quickly ‘leaking’ out. As Part One has pointed out (eg.
the Moses Coady story), credit unions and co-operatives
are well tried and tested ways to achieve this end.
International experience affirms how critical such
initiatives are. For example, Bangladesh is regularly hit by
floods, earthquakes, and typhoons. It is also the birthplace
of the Grameen Bank – a micro-finance institution whose
operating model is based on an understanding that its
clients often experience extreme conditions as well as
more stable times. After major flooding in 1998, some
households lost their ability to generate income for up
to 90 days. Some people lost their homes and access to
their crops or animals, and at the same time, day to day
costs of food, transport, and other essentials rose steeply.
Grameen and other institutions responded by innovating
new savings products – some compulsory, some voluntary
– which were designed to release resources to clients only
in the event of a future emergency.
Although the impacts of flooding have yet to match
the severity of conditions in Bangladesh, far-sighted
organisations such as the New Economics Foundation
have long championed the importance of innovating local
financial instruments to
‘plug the leaks’ in the local
economy to help ensure
local well-being through
thick and thin.
This move towards economic localisation raises important
questions about how comparatively wealthy communities
who have effectively plugged some leaks can quickly
move on to share their talents and financial resources
with less resourced communities. This is an issue that the
Fair Trade Towns and Counties movement has begun to
address: Fair Trade is about ensuring that farmers and
producers everywhere can achieve a fair price for their
labours.
There are many, many stories from the Fiery Spirits
Community of Practice about economic and energy self-
reliance in action. Entrepreneurial people are inventing
exciting new forms of community based organisations
to hold, finance and steward local assets. This section
draws from a small portion of such stories, culminating
with a story from the 2001 currency crisis in Argentina.
The Argentina experience prompts a question of how
to ensure that this groundswell of economic
localism continues to gather
pace, supported by
new experiments
in complementary
currencies that
may help to buffer
the impacts
of continuing
global economic
commodity
and currency
turbulence.

41
Roger Hutchinson has
published this powerful
story with Birlinn, Edinburgh
in a book by the same
name (2006): “Calum’s road
would become a powerful
and beautiful symbol of
one man’s defiance against
the erosion of his native
culture”.
Bill Currie quoting
Islander Maggie in the
West Highland Free
Press, 13th June 2002.
See Lucy Conway’s
‘FierySpirits’ blog post
for the full story: http://
ruralresilience.ning.com/
profiles/blogs/thoughts-
on-winning-l300k-in
see
http://islandsgoinggreen.org/
The Scottish Highlands and Islands:
hotbed of localisation innovation
A visit to many of the remote communities in the
Highlands and Islands of Scotland can be illuminating for
anyone interested in getting to grips with what resilience is
all about. Island communities in particular reveal the limits
of modern life, where long distances and harsh weather
challenge the robustness of globalised supply chains, and
reveal the resourcefulness of remote dwellers.
Sit in a traditional music session in a Scottish pub, and
likely as not, in between some fast jigs, the fiddlers
might weave in the haunting tune ‘Calum’s Road’. It was
penned by Donald Shaw (the accordionist in Capercaillie)
to commemorate the story of Calum MacLeod of Raasay
who, when the local council refused to build a two-mile
road to his croft, did the job himself. Some time in 1966,
with a sledgehammer,
pick-axe and his
piece (sandwich) in a
wheelbarrow, Calum
set about a task that
would take him the best
part of twenty years.
Visit many crafting
townships today and
variations on this spirit of stubborn self-reliance is
achieving equally remarkable results. These are places
where residents have learned to turn their hand to almost
anything, including organising community buy-outs of over
400,000 acres across the Highlands and islands since land
reform legislation was passed by the Scottish Parliament
on 25th
February, 2003.
The Islanders of Eigg were pioneers who helped put land
reform back on the agenda in the first place. On 12th
June
1997, they bought their island for £1.75 million after a
huge public appeal for support which yielded a private,
anonymous donation of £1 million. They then set about
the long road to transforming a ‘run-down and unstable’
community:
The old tearoom was dilapidated and tilting
above the pier road; the pier was inadequate
for anything but flit boats to laboriously
transport cargo and passengers ashore from
the ferry which served the island; and much of
the housing scattered around the three-by-five-
mile island was in a state of constant disrepair.
Worst of all, the future of its people – the
underpinning of any community – was
unstable. There was no way for residents
to put down roots. Croft land is limited on
Eigg. Leases were virtually non-existent, and
the entire island had
been in the hands of
increasingly erratic
private owners.
In 2010, the Islanders were back in the headlines, this
time taking a winner’s share of a £1 million ‘Big Green
Challenge’ prize awarded by the National Endowment for
Science, Technology and the
Arts (NESTA) for community-
led climate change action.
As well as the technical
achievement of installing
Europe’s first community-
owned renewable energy
grid, it was the integration of carbon reduction activities
into the everyday lives of
islanders that particularly
impressed the judges.
The Eigg system is
novel because households are fined £20 if they exceed
their 5kwh domestic limit, with the money going to the
community. The story raises questions about whether
other communities may be willing to go down a similar
road in the future?
The Highlands and Islands are full of similarly inspiring
stories. Eday lies in the heart of Orkney’s Northern
Isles, 16 miles north of Kirkwall, and the 150 strong
population have owned the community shop for over two
decades. If all goes according to plan, in 2011 the Eday
Partnership will significantly scale up their ambitions
by taking ownership of a £1.67 million, 900KW wind
turbine. Partnership Chair Clive Brookes believes this
investment will “put us in control of our own destiny” by
generating up to £120,000 annually for further community
investment. A Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE)
scheme called ‘Initiatives at the Edge’ has helped to
develop the Partnership that has made the plan possible,
offering islanders development resources and a route
beyond ‘volunteer fatigue’. The Partnership – which
employs several specialist staff including a Ranger and a
‘Powerdown Officer’– has also helped to secure grants for
capital developments at the Hostel, the old Baptist Church
(now a heritage/visitor centre), and for a new slipway.

42
However, challenges remain on Eday. Only “real and
meaningful employment” can help sustain momentum
once grant funding ends: “we all need to become a lot
more business-minded” (to quote Clive Brookes again).
This process has already started. In summer 2010 the
Partnership carried out a pilot ‘fast boat’ project to test
the market for a fast and more direct service between
Eday and its neighbours – which also doubles up as a
tourist trip for spotting porpoises, seals, and the nearby
European Marine Energy Centre’s test site. HIE staff
member Chessa Llewellyn-White from HIE points out that
the coming of the turbine and fast boat businesses have
been “a bit of an eye-opener”, presenting new challenges
of complex cash flows and organisational growing
pains – such as putting in place new systems to separate
out income generation from charitable activities, and
generating reliable financial reports to ensure a £1 million
loan is paid back.
Today, a string of community land buy-out communities
are supporting each other to generate housing, energy
and employment initiatives sufficient to lure young families
to contribute to the future life of remote communities.
These places show how it might be possible for
communities everywhere to steward more actively their
local land, institutions and other assets – from food and
water to buildings and the supply of finance. Community
land ownership is proving itself a powerful catalyst
for activity on all these fronts in these contexts. One
Community of Practice participant put it this way:
All our livelihoods and energy needs are
ultimately met through our direct or indirect
interaction with the natural systems on which
we depend. There is a real danger here of
continuing the analysis that blames the poor
for their poverty and for the degradation of
their environments. What is needed is an
analysis and proposal which places defending
or re-establishing community ownership and
use of natural resources as the solution to
poverty and environmental degradation (local
people know they depend on the resources
around them)
participant Carnegie UK Trust resilience seminar, 2008
However, land ownership is no instant panacea. When
a community takes responsibility for land, what
safeguards will ensure it is managed well? Without
additional support, many communities may struggle to
find enough people with sufficient skills to steward local
resources effectively. Building these skills takes time,
investment, and mentors who can build local confidence:
without such supports, the resilience skills gap will be
difficult to close. This is an area where LEADER funding
from Europe has proven its worth in the past, and remains
a unique source of external support.
Recognising vulnerability to
energy price hikes
Energy price volatility is an increasing concern for
everyone. Just a few years ago conversations about
‘Peak Oil’ were confined to oil industry insiders and
Transition Towns activists. With rapidly escalating oil
prices impacting everyone in 2011, such activists don’t
need to offer screenings of films such as The End of
Surburbia and How Cuba Survived Peak Oil to spell out
the likely impacts of the end of cheap oil.
Nevertheless, these resources continue to help community
groups think carefully about the risks of not preparing
for peak oil. The argument goes that severely oscillating
prices (or sustained high prices) threaten extreme
disruptions to our way of life
in the near to medium term
future. The longer we wait to
make the transition to a lean
economy, the harder the
landing is going to be.
For a closer look at the potential of LEADER, see the
booklet A Common Rural Development Policy? which
proposes that a comprehensive and well-financed
policy of supporting rural enterprises and community
initiatives alongside farming interests will help address the
continuing challenge of low farm incomes and need for new
business start-ups. http://www.carnegieuktrust.org.uk/
publications/a_common_rural_development_policy1
http://www.endofsuburbia.com/ and
http://www.powerofcommunity.org/cm/index.php
An excellent primer on this
and connected issues is
Chris Mastenson’s crash
course, at http://www.
chrismartenson.com/
page/crash-course-one-
year-anniversary

43
In February 2010, a report of an
Industry Taskforce on energy
and peak oil comprising Virgin,
Arup, Scottish and Southern
Energy agreed that latest oil
futures research (supported
most recently by a report of the
International Energy Agency
itself) suggests that global crude
oil demand may have already
outstripped supply.
Rather than resulting in
sustained high prices, most
peak oil models suggest that the global economy may
experience increasing frequency and scale of economic
‘bubbles’ that burst as oil price volatility distorts markets
and severely disrupts the capacities of businesses, small
and large, to plan. The most forward-thinking local
business people are already trying to factor in such
risks. For example, a researcher from the University of
Liverpool interviewed by Future Proof Kilkenny illustrated
how he had helped a dairy farm
to conduct an ‘oil vulnerability
analysis’:
Some of the initial findings were shocking.
When we did our first analysis we looked at
5 particular elements connected to oil price;
fuels, energy, petrochemicals, man-made
materials and components. When we did
the initial analysis of the farm we found that
around 17% of the costs related to the price
of oil. But the beauty of the audit is the way
in which it breaks down an analysis of the
component activities and processes. So when
we began to look at the cultivation of the
plants to feed the 200 herd cattle we found
that 80% of the costs of cultivation related
to the price of oil. This was petrochemicals
such as herbicides, pesticides, insecticides
and fertiliser, not really a petrochemical but
hugely dependant on hydrocarbons. Once
we understood that we shot from 17% oil
vulnerable up to 70% oil vulnerable. 17% is
bad enough but 70% is shocking.
In some cases, recognising the growing urgency of
questions about ‘peak oil’ has prompted traditional
community development organisations to evolve their
ways of working. For example, in Northern Ireland
Rural Community Network (RCN) has traditionally only
responded to issues raised directly by local people.
However, during 2009 RCN conducted an experiment to
invite local people to think about what might happen if oil
prices rose to £5 per litre. Project worker Aidan Campbell
reported that the exercise worked well – and that it seems
that many people in traditional rural areas are already
aware of the potential consequences on transport, jobs
and the future viability of traditional rural communities.
Few groups, however, had yet developed action plans
to address this knowledge. Aidan termed this a ‘values
action’ gap. It is this gap
that projects like LightFoot
Enterprise’s Household
Energy Surveys are
beginning to address.
Household Energy Surveys in
the Marches
In 2005 in the Marches, a small group of residents set
out to construct a community-owned Household Energy
Service (HES) with a view to putting power to manage
energy use in the hands of householders. Local volunteers
carried out a home energy survey which made tailored
recommendations for conserving energy, reducing energy
consumption and switching to local and renewable energy
sources. Word spread about the service as people started
to transfer what Light Foot Enterprises, who run the
scheme, call ‘energy wisdom’. The idea is that this energy
wisdom enables a new local energy market to emerge.
Rachel Francis of Light Foot says:
In Bishops Castle, where engagement of
households now amounts to over one in five
of the population, demand is growing for a
range of energy services at local level as well as
affordable deals and renewable options…. It’s
no good if our service simply passes people
by or just stays within the circle of the existing
green community. We have drawn heavily
upon marketing know-how and research
into sustainable behaviour to help broaden
engagement.
(personal communication)
See, for example, the
Centre for Alternative
Technology’s Zero
Carbon Britain report
and a February
2010 report of an
Industry Taskforce
on energy and peak
oil comprising Virgin,
Arup, Scottish and
Southern Energy
and others: http://
peakoiltaskforce.
net/download-the-
report/2010-peak-oil-
report/
http://www.liv.ac.uk/
researchintelligence/
issue34/oil.htm
http://futureproofkilkenny.org/?p=405
See Aidan’s presentation
at http://ruralresilience.
ning.com/video/resilience-
podcast-no4

44
Light Foot’s work is characterised by a process of trial-
and-error: as with many community-led solutions, lessons
from one place can’t always be easily replicated in others.
Instead, it’s a process of trial and error – such as replacing
the requirement for an initial survey with a ‘leader’ offer
of offering a free draught excluder as a first step into the
process. Rachel Francis sums up the experience:
We have to stay dynamic, uncluttered and
able to prioritise community needs, but even
that is not easy at times. Our strategies work
when they are authentic, warm and honest.
That too is part of resilience.
Questions of size and scale of local
energy initiatives
The house-to-house work that Rachel and colleagues in
the Marches are engaged with is part of a bigger picture
about how we create more resilient systems for producing
and distributing energy. These are questions taxing
national politicians who are charged with ensuring we
don’t face black-outs as existing power stations come to
the end of their lives. In December 2010, the UK Energy
and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne laid out three
connected challenges in this way:
. First, our demand for electricity could double by
2050 as we shift from fossil fuels to electricity for our
vehicles and our residual home heating.
. Secondly, around a quarter of our generating capacity
is ageing plant that will shut down within 10 years, and
has to be replaced.
. Thirdly, that replacement cycle – entailing some
£110bn of investment, or more than double the normal
amount in the next decade – must be in low-carbon
and secure sources like renewables, nuclear, clean
coal and gas if we are to meet our climate change
targets. Left alone, the current market will not deliver
these objectives at the lowest cost.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
finance/newsbysector/
energy/8204586/The-biggest-
energy-market-shake-up-in-
25-years.html

45
At a community level, it’s possible to complement large-
scale redesign of national energy systems by creating
local energy generation solutions (turbines, biodigestors
etc.). Usually, these systems feed into the national grid,
and so are vulnerable if the grid fails. Resilience thinking
suggests that ‘modular’ – or distributed – grids will be
better at withstanding and then recovering from shocks
than relying on the centralised national grid alone.
Experiments such as Eigg’s community-owned electricity
grid demonstrate that it is possible for a local community
to establish its own system – but the cost of this energy
sovereignty are strong limits on local consumption:
If everyone did this, it would mean that together we’d all
use a LOT LESS electricity, which would mean power
companies wouldn’t need to generate as much thus
closing the ‘energy gap’ and (the really cool bit), saving
you money! Spreading the load is good too – means the
poor old national grid isn’t trying to deal with huge swings
from high to low demand.
Eigg isn’t in a position to fall back on the national grid
in the event of failure – instead, the old system of noisy
oil-powered household generators would kick in again.
However, even though Eigg’s situation is unlike most
communities in the UK, the Eigg Electric story has sparked
the interest of many. It demonstrates why the experience
of remote communities can be particularly valuable to
society as a whole: innovations ‘at the edge’ challenge
the rest of us to consider questions of energy justice.
Could we achieve a more equitable distribution of energy
use between energy-intensive and energy-lean local
economies? Would other local communities voluntarily
accept limits on energy use in the way that Eigg residents
have done? Is it important that local communities own
their own electricity generation and distribution systems?
One workshop commented:
…I think it is important to put some control
over those huge resources in the hands of
the communities and not leave it to the
multinationals that currently come in and set
up massive operations with a token gesture
to the local community council, you know
ten thousand pounds a year for community
activities, but actually when communities
take control of those assets like in Gigha and
they put up their own turbines and that helps
fund their own housing issues then that can
make a real difference and that is how rural
communities can be more resilient but they
have to be given the support in terms of the
initial capital investment to make that work…
Participant, Rural Convention 2009
On a tour around the Centre for Alternative Techology at a
conference called Power and Place, we learned how CAT
has for many years been asking such questions in relation
to running their own onsite electricity generation grid. In
the early days, CAT pioneers were determined to be as
self-sufficient as possible, without relying on the wider
world. In the end they gave up however – recognising that
isolating themselves from the mains supply meant limits
on the organisation’s ability to grow. Peter Harper (long
term CAT staff member) reflects:
It’s interesting … at the beginning of CAT
back in the 70s we definitely shared the view
that [the future] was going to be a collective,
rather decentralised and rather self-sufficient
economies. For one reason or another we’ve
abandoned that… now we are serving for a
globalisation – I don’t want to deny the need
for resilience – we need to build that in… but
we’re thinking of reaching out to Europe, to
supergrids, exporting our gold mine North
Sea… having a more integrated rather than a
less integrated Europe.
Peter Harper, CAT
Centre for Alternative Technology

46
Peter introduced important issues into the People and
Place conversation: How do different scales connect?
What is the right balance between local grids and super
grids? CAT publication Zero Carbon Britain is a good
place to look for some answers. The report was written
to show how climate tipping points can be averted. The
recommendations are often revolutionary, not least
proposing major changes in land use, transport, and diet.
Energy supply and money availability are closely
connected in today’s globalised economy. With a growing
realisation of the vulnerability of national currencies, an
increasing number of resilience activists are experimenting
with local currencies. Recent Irish and Argentinian
experience can help to explain why – and how.
Towards resilient
local money: how
Irish activists are
learning lessons
from Argentina’s
currency crisis
During 2001, Argentina experienced a currency crisis
that accompanied its economic collapse. As part of an
international attempt to stabilise its currency, Argentina
agreed to peg the value of its peso to the United States
dollar, but investors lost all confidence and a flight of
capital followed. Five presidents came and went, people
were only allowed to withdraw about 200 pesos a
week, and the government began seizing public servant
pensions. A run on the banks ensued, and all bank
accounts were then frozen for 90 days. By December,
violent rioting broke and the government defaulted on its
debt obligations. There was soon no cash at all circulating
within the Argentine economy. Into the vacuum, barter
markets swiftly emerged. Those with some experience in
barter systems trained others and the idea spread rapidly:
market organisers required newcomers to attend training
sessions before they could participate in these new
markets. Schools, parks and gymnasiums were used as
exchange sites:
Members were expected to arrive early and
help set up tables. Before each session, people
first browsed the market in order to plan their
trades. Market rules and guidelines were
created to help the process run smoothly and
fairly. They also developed strategies so that
entertainment was provided for children to
keep them occupied away from trading areas.
Street theater, clowns, musicians not only
improved the atmosphere for the young, but
also gave an avenue for expression that served
to diffuse conflict. Thus, a culture flourished
alongside trade.
Over time, communities with the greatest degrees of local
production in value-added areas such as food, wood,
and even specialty commodities like honey were much
stronger than communities with less local production:
regional trade was only possible through such value-
added goods. Civil servants and white-collar workers
had to rapidly drop their prices whilst farmers were
most secure. Meanwhile, more complex systems of
exchange – local currencies –emerged as people started
manufacturing and trading durable goods. Some of
these systems experienced inflation, for example in the
market for spare parts not manufactured locally. Solar and
outdoor ovens became more prevalent, though they had
limited seasonal use. Services fared best in areas where
they were run by local community cooperatives whose
members had a strong interest in maintaining them.
The story of the Argentine money crisis was brought to
the attention of a large Irish audience in Tipperary at a
Community of Practice event hosted by Tipperary Institute
in Thurles. ‘New economics’ author Richard Douthwaite
gave a talk that began by suggesting that society has still
to learn the real lessons of the credit crunch, predicting
further difficulties for the Irish economy which have
since played out as Europe and the IMF offered a bailout
later that year. Douthwaite has long foreseen the global
economic instability that caught many of his contemporary
economists unawares in 2007. For example, in Short
Circuit (1996), Douthwaite was already proposing how
communities could implement community owned wind
energy, local currencies, community supported agriculture
and many other innovations which are today becoming
widespread.
With thanks to Kate Bodi
and her first-hand article
published 31st October
2010 on Culture Change
website http://www.
culturechange.org/cms/
content/view/681/1/
The whole book is available
for free here: http://www.
feasta.org/documents/
shortcircuit/contents.html
There’s a good workbook – ‘The Sharing Solution’ –
available for free at http://files.uniteddiversity.com/Money_
and_Economics/The_Sharing_Solution.pdf Douthwaite’s
more recent The Ecology of Money is available to read
online at http://www.feasta.org/documents/
moneyecology/contents.htm

47
Douthwaite’s talk in mid 2010 centred around a little
know event that happened as the Lehman Brothers bank
collapsed: oil tankers bound for Ireland were halted in the
tracks at Gulf ports. They were not sailing for shortage of
oil, but because banks had stopped trusting each other to
honour their promises. This meant that the oil companies
couldn’t get the credit slips they needed to guarantee they
would be paid for the shipments at the other end. Above,
we have pointed to a film that shows how Cuba rapidly
adjusted to the consequences of a rapid hiatus in oil
supplies following the collapse of the Soviet Union. There
are also lessons to learn from closer to home.
In September 2000 across the UK lorry drivers and
farmers blockaded oil facilities for several days in protest
at proposed fuel duties. By Monday 11th September,
panic buying of petrol began to close some petrol
stations; the next day, 3,000 petrol stations were reported
closed and the BBC reported that the government’s
emergency committee had begun to mobilise the military
to get supplies to critical services – including the NHS,
which was put on red alert. Perhaps most worrying was
that the major supermarkets warned they would run out
of food within days. The government was forced to back
down and had learned how vulnerable the nation was to
future disruptions in oil supplies.
In the 2008 credit crunch, it was not refineries that were
blockaded, but the banking system that was blocked
from enabling business as usual. Faced with no food on
supermarket shelves, governments felt they had no option
but to bail out the banks by borrowing colossal amounts
of money – and then printing money to pay it back.
There are, fortunately, opportunities for local communities
to conduct experiments keeping money circulating which
national governments can’t propose easily. Whilst the
national media focuses on bigger and bigger bailouts as
even countries threaten to go bankrupt, Totnes, Lewes,
Stroud, Brixton and other places are trialling alternative
systems. Like the Argentina
experience, such initiatives
have forerunners in the regional
trade tokens that used to be
used in the UK and Ireland
throughout the 17th
and 18th
Century. In County Mayo, Douthwaite and colleagues
now want to go one step further to establish a regional
‘liquidity network’:
A Liquidity Network is an innovative payment
system to enable local authorities and
businesses to maintain services, exchange
goods and pay salaries without the need
for euros. Combining the best features of
local trading systems such as the Swiss
Wirtschaftsring with electronic payment
systems used in Japan and elsewhere, they
are an emergency measure to help local
economies keep business moving and prevent
further job losses
From http://theliquiditynetwork.org/
More and more local communities are starting to
recognise the value in experimenting with local money
systems in view of the risks associated with full scale
dependence on national currencies, and the risks of
further recessions in the global economy. Unlike in
Argentina, we might see this time as one where we have
the privilege to learn what works before the robustness of
these systems is tested at scale and for real:
Like the old story of the frog in hot water,
if the situation is gradually deteriorating,
as it is in Ireland at the moment, we may
not respond… if there’s a sudden crash,
we do recognise that things can’t go on the
way we have been going.
Richard Douthwaite, FEASTA, speaking at Tipperary
Institute Summer 2009
See a picture report at
http://www.guardian.
co.uk/society/
gallery/2010/sep/21/
trade-tokens-local-
currencies
This is the apocryphal story
of the frog that fails to jump
out water that is being
brought slowly to the boil –
see http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Boiling_frog

48
2.5 Cultural resilience
Whatever is given can always be re-imagined
Seamus Heaney, The Nettle Bed
The world may come to an end, but love
and music will endure
Gaelic proverb
When I think of ‘resilience’ it immediately
makes me think of the Welsh word ‘hyfywedd’
which I suppose translates as vital or strong
– so resilience is a much more positive,
descriptive word of where we’re at within the
work of Theatre Felinfach and where I think
the work of communities is at – more positive
descriptions…
Dwynwyn Lloyd Evans, Theatr Felinfach, Ceredigion
Learning from an oral history of the
1966 Seaman’s strike, Lewis
In September 2009, BBC Radio Scotland’s early morning
‘Thought for the Day’ programme was presented by
Alastair McIntosh, a theologian and human ecologist
whose book Soil and Soul tells the story of growing up
on the Island of Lewis – and his subsequent work as
an activist and advocate of community resilience in the
Highlands and Islands. In the broadcast, McIntosh aired
his perspective on what makes a place resilient – informed
by new research about whether the Outer Hebrides are
more, or less, resilient
today than forty years ago
(Eden 2009). The researcher,
Lauren Eden, used the
powerful research method
of oral history – a great way
for any community to begin to seek old resilience wisdom
that is lying waiting to be discovered in every community:
It’s a year ago today since our banking systems were very nearly
engulfed following the collapse of the Lehman Brothers in America.
And I bet I’m not alone in wondering what if our own government’s
financial bail-out had not happened and succeeded.
Not only might the hole-in-the-wall have stopped talking to us. But our
globalised food supply system could also have been thrown into chaos,
because without the banks doing their bit you don’t get the deliveries
coming through.
I’ve thought a lot about this recently while working with an Edinburgh
University student seconded to my supervision. She went up to
Stornoway and interviewed people about what happens when the
Ullapool ferry fails to sail because of bad weather. ...
quoted in ‘Learning for Rural Resilience’, Shan
Ashton and Bryan Collis, Bangor University, Carnegie
UK Trust Rural Action Research Programme 2008
For guidance on starting an oral history project, try
http://www.oralhistory.org.uk/advice/index.php: “Before
interviewing someone it’s useful to have done some
background research. Have a look at any books, maps or
old newspapers that might be relevant in your local library
or record office or on the web. Prepare a list of questions
but be careful that this does not make you too rigid in your
questioning approach…
Eden, L. 2009 When
the Ship Doesn’t Sail:
Measuring Socioeconomic
Resilience on the Isle of
Lewis. Unpublished thesis,
University of Edinburgh.

49
... She learned that the supermarket shelves quickly go bare, and it’s not
just panic buying. It’s also because restocking is on a just-in-time basis,
and so there’s no slack to make up for any disruption in the system.
For the sake of comparison she then went on to interview people who
could remember the six week long seamen’s strike in 1966, that forced
Harold Wilson to declare a national state of emergency.
Most people said they’d avoided hardship because crofting was still
vibrant. They had their own potatoes, hens, sheep, and maybe a cow
for milk or a fishing boat moored in the loch. But above all, they had an
ethos of sharing.
This gave the local economy the resilience by which it could stand up
to knocks. But in contrast, today we have greater efficiency, but it’s also
a more brittle system – like the banking crisis could very nearly have
taught us.
The lesson is that economic efficiency is vital, but only if matched by
the community resilience that makes for true security.
That’s why such principles as Fair Trade, farmers’ markets and local
entrepreneurship are all so important.
They remind us that the economy should be not just about money, but
also about the human handshakes that reflect right relationships … for
they’re what counts when the ferry fails to sail.
Transcript of ‘Thought for the Day’, 15th
September 2009, reproduced from
www.alastairmcintosh.com (with permission)
For McIntosh, it is the ‘human handshakes’ of indigenous
crofting culture that underpin true community resilience.
In this culture, resourcefulness and flexibility are second
nature: it’s not really necessary to invent a concept like
‘resilience’. Living folk memory – though dance, music,
poetry, story – already keeps alive understandings of what
it means to sustain ‘right relationship’ between human and
natural communities.
Global indigenous rights and
climate justice movements
have long struggled to
secure the cultural survival
of marginalised cultures
and communities. These
struggles continue today in
many places.
A number of film-makers have attempted to make bring
an indigenous world-view to the cinema screen. See
for example James Cameron’s block-buster film Avatar
and the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi – see http://www.
koyaanisqatsi.org/ (taken from the Hopi language meaning
‘life out of balance’ or ‘life in turmoil’) – which used time-
lapse photography to reveal how out of kilter the speed,
technology and energy profligacy of modern economies is
with traditional ways of living close to the land.
see for example
http://www.ienearth.org/
These movements have
won a UN Declaration on
the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples (2007) which
now enshrines rights to
“strengthen [indigenous
peoples] distinctive spiritual
and material relationship
with their lands, territories,
waters and coastal seas”.

50
Gaelic poet Iain Crichton Smith (1928-1998) was
intensely aware of the decline of his native language
and of the threat to his culture’s resilience. In his book
Towards the Human (1996) he says why Gaelic must
not be allowed to die:
To be an islander is to inhabit real space
on a real earth.... He has his proverbs, his
philosophies, the cemeteries and cradles of his
hopes: his tasks and his loves: his language.
Behind the judgment made on him by the
bureaucrat is the idea that his world is in some
way irrelevant…
If there is no Gaelic left, will not the islander
live in a disappearing landscape, as an
Englishman would if his language were slowly
to die? … If he were to wake one morning and
look around him and see “hill” and not “cnoc,”
would he not be an expatriate of his own land?
For we are born inside a language and see
everything from within its parameters: it is
not we who make language, it is language that
makes us….
To live is to be conscious of a history… the
possibility of a future means that the children
must grow up in a world that they recognise as
being as important as any other ... It requires a
government that is concerned for all its people
including those who speak a language that
they do not understand.
Crichton Smith (1996)
Whilst Crichton Smith is fearful of what might be,
McIntosh’s tone is much more up-beat. In his poem The
Forge, he suggests that a vibrant cultural renaissance is
underway that connects people, place, and language:
The Forge
What is the point of land reform
so that remote communities
can be preserved
as threatened cultures
at a massive social cost
to the nation as a whole
… [we] stoke the glowing hearth anew to smelt
and skim and pour a precious shimmering
stream refined by sense of place and ancient
lore
… and hammer out the beauty, of the braided
crofting way …which is our greatest export, to
this world that’s gone astray…and that’s the
point of land reform
in the politics
of today.
Alastair McIntosh, excerpt from ‘The Forge’,
pub. In The Crofter, No. 73, Dec. 2006, p. 5
In the dialogue between the despair of Crichton-Smith
and the hope in McIntosh’s poems is a call to move
from an idea that community resilience, in an indigenous
context, is simply about ‘resistance’ to something that is
more complex, fruitful and creative. Hope lies in making
creative innovations from within traditional cultures that
help young people to stay in the communities where they
grow up – and to use this cultural resurgence to guide
responses to the complex and turbulent futures we are all
likely to be facing.

51
Ferment: lessons from Celtic
Neighbours
From 2004-2009, Carnegie UK Trust worked with the
BiG Lottery, UK to support a major rural action research
programme (RARP). One stream of the RARP was an
ambitious programme called ‘Celtic Neighbours’, which
developed cultural exchanges across Wales, Scotland and
Ireland:
Imagination, language, creativity, culture
…. Can you think of anything else that can
transport people and bring them along on a
journey of the imagination? These are the
things that give us the spirit and resolve to
make our own path into the future and to
make this future better
Dermot Maclaughlin,
Chief Executive Temple
Bar Cultural Trust, from
Ferment
Meic Llewellyn, Celtic Neighbours co-ordinator, is
passionately committed to harnessing the creativity within
cultural traditions in service of navigating challenging,
changing times:
Alongside our economic and aesthetic
resources, and long-standing traditions of
sustainability, generosity and thrift, the
everyday business of cultural production is a
key driver of development here.
Meic Llewellyn, from the introduction to ‘Ferment’
Celtic Neighbours sought to catalyse and enhance new
innovations in ‘cultural production’ by establishing a new
network to broach new connections between diverse
Celtic-speaking communities across the UK and Ireland.
This very practical work continues today, with touring
artists offering workshops and performances, and cross-
community events supported by simultaneous translations
into Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic and Welsh. Against a
background where many traditional communities have
become used to resisting change at all costs in order to
preserve a cultural inheritance that has been at risk of
extinction, the work of Celtic Neighbours introduces new
and more creative ways of relating to change. Meic and
colleagues maintain that celebrating and encouraging this
shift is vital for renewing and enhancing Celtic language
community resilience. As Gwyn Jones, contributor to
Ferment, puts it:
I feel it’s important that our work is innovative
and cutting-edge, even when the form is a
traditional one. Looking to the future, we have
to ensure our cultures are alive and inviting
for the young, and they don’t feel that to be
daring or cool they have to use English… Only
last week, when we had a technical hiccup
sorting out our Hebridean weblink, I made
contact with a school on Anglesey who have
linked with one in Lesotho, and they helped
me find a way round it. Developing the
links we know exist between us as Celts and
because of our shared historical and economic
experiences doesn’t mean we close our minds
to the rest of the world – in fact, the opposite
is true. But we do have a huge amount to learn
from each other. Look how far ahead the
traditional music scene is in Ireland compared
to us, or story-telling in the Hebrides.
From Ferment: culture, confidence and regeneration in rural
Celtic communities.
One stream of RARP
partners followed a similar
trajectory. Focusing on
resilience skills, several
organisations undertook
action research to test out
a ‘skills bank’ that had
been developed for rural
community development
practitioners. In Wales,
Shan Ashton and Bryan
Collis, of the Wales Council
for Voluntary Action (WCVA)
called their project Learning
for Rural Resilience. As
with the Celtic Neighbours,
Download ‘Ferment’ from
http://www.voluntaryarts.
org/uploaded/map11386.pdf
It’s useful to note that many
advocates of the ‘peak oil’
movement stress that the
skills gap is perhaps the
most alarming deficiency of
modern society potentially
facing a need to many
more farmers, renewable
energy engineers, etc..
There remains work to
be done to integrate this
analysis into the tradition
community development
skills bank…
One output of Carnegie’s
Rural Action Research
Project (RARP), available at
www.carnegieuk.org/rural

52
the work was based on an appreciation of the power of
valuing traditional cultural values, and enhancing the
creative spark that is already alive in places. In an echo
of Moses Coady’s earlier work in Nova Scotia (see Part
One), Ashton and Collis wanted to challenge a view that
although “change is happening and inevitable… these
changes are most often perceived as threatening or
limiting”. Again, exchange visits and learning sessions
were established to open up opportunities to reflect on
how change is perceived within traditional Welsh farming
communities:
…cultural history
is empowering. In
order for rural people
to invest in their
place, they need to
believe their rural
place has value…
ordinary working
people are capable
of social inquiry
and analysis, and
that this capability
can be enhanced by
practice...
Ashton and Collis
The skills focus of this initiative helped maintain a focus
|on practical outcomes for groups. For example, one
exercise invited local
people to create a
strategy to prioritise
local actions based on
a local skills audit:
In another innovative move, Bangor University awarded
a ‘community certificate’ to groups that successfully
completed the programme.
Welcoming migrant workers,
Northern Ireland
In Derry, Northern Ireland, Eddie Kerr and colleagues at
Seeds Co-operative have demonstrated an inspiring and
different route toward fostering greater cultural diversity –
and therefore resilience. SEEDS began life in 2004 to offer
support to new residents from many different countries
– and today, the organisation has over 490 members from
38 nationalities. The Seeds website picks up the story:
Because inward migration is a relatively
new phenonmenon to Northern Ireland,
the indigenous communities are coming to
terms with the influx of new citizens. This has
created many issues and concerns and these
must be addressed urgently. Many migrant
workers are ill prepared to live in a society that
is currently coming to terms with centuries
of sectarian politics. We are working closely
with many statutory bodies and community
representatives to reduce the impact of change
in a society going through transition. We need
to find methods and techniques of working
with all parties creating a safe and supportive
environment for all people living and working
in this region. ...
Thread
Existing
knowledge/assets
in the community
How to use them
Knowledge/
assets needed
Where to access
the knowledge/
assets
Community
Energy
Company
Wide range of
knowledge and
technical skills available
Ensure the project is understood
as a grass roots led project for
the benefit of the community
Knowledge about
appropriate
business form
Wales cooperative
Centre
Ashton S et al, 2007,
Skills for Rural Community
Development: Wales Report,
Carnegie Trust UK (RARP),
Section 6.4 Discussion
Key references shaping
Ashton and Collis’ approach
were Nachtegal P
Hass T, 2000, Annenberg
Rural Challenge: School
Reform From a Slightly
Different Point of View
In J C Montgomery
A D Kitchenham (eds)
Proceedings of the Rural
Communities and Identities
in the Global Millenium
International Conference,
Malapino University
College, Rural Communities
Research Development
Centre, British Columbia.
See also Rahman A, 1993,
People’s Self Development:
perspectives on participatory
action research, Zed Books.

53
... As a first step in this direction SEEDS has
opened a ‘One World Centre’ (incorporating
a Multi-Cultural Centre) providing a
range of services and activities promoting
integration and meeting unmet needs. We
want to respond to the needs of the growing
number of new citizens and migrants to the
North West of Ireland region and represent
a link between the North West’s immigrant
community and statutory and voluntary
services. This is the first One World Centre
of its kind in Ireland and now houses seven
different ethnic minority groups as well as
the Foyle Language
School.
Seeds came into existence after a small number of
community workers acted in response to their awareness of
change in their community – in this case as large numbers
of migrants attempted to find their feet in a community with
a complex history. In the future, it is likely that many more
people will be displaced by economic and environmental
disruptions. Whilst national politicians will continue to
argue about how open a country’s borders should be, at a
community level organisations such as Seeds show that it
is possible to rise to the challenge of integrating incomers in
ways that reflect positively on the values of local people:
Integration is not an automatic consequence
of learning the language of the host
community. Individuals must also participate
in the life of the community. SEEDS language
courses have always been underpinned by the
importance of a social integration programme.
In 2008 this programme expanded to include
visits to places of practical and cultural interest
– libraries, service providers, local museums,
theatres, galleries, and sites of cultural and
historical significance. We have designed
a programme encompassing local cultural
aspects as
well as oral
history
lessons.
What motivates people like Eddie to throw themselves into
this kind of work, often at great personal expense? In his
contribution to the Celtic Neighbours book Ferment, Eddie
reflected on how creative writing and community work
aren’t so far apart:
I don’t see the processes of writing and
community work as essentially different…
They’re both about creating, and responding
to need. They both contribute to releasing the
creativitiy in people and making life more
rewarding. Both demand innovative thought,
and both can be heartbreaking when results
won’t come, and better than any drug when
they run away with you.
Eddie Kerr, quoted in Ferment, ibid.
Place Based Learning in Cornwall
Cornwall is a hotbed of cultural activism – and has offered
many stories of community innovation into Carnegie’s
Rural Development Programme over the years. The
outreach team at the Eden Project have been trailblazers,
working with artists to dream up inspiring ways for local
people to get involved in community planning. It was
through our Eden colleagues that learned of an inspiring
young peoples’ dance group from Camborne, Cornwall
called the TR14ers (after the local post-code), who are
breathing a sense of infectious life and energy into a
community suffering multiple disadvantage. The group
is run by and for young people, and research has shown
how their activities helps people to move ‘from apathy to
anger to positive energy’.
Young people are also at the heart of another Cornish
cultural initiative led by Will Coleman – a story-teller and
bagpipe player whose passion is to put place-based
learning at the centre of the school curriculum. Will
and colleagues create materials and experiences for
children which underline the value and uniquness of
their places, and the potential to make a good future
life there. Beyond the virtual worlds of Facebook and
YouTube, place-based learning engages all the senses
by getting out and about exploring local history, wildlife,
http://www.seeds.ie/
aboutus_alt.html
SEEDS,
‘RARP
Progress
Report.’
Carnegie UK
Trust, (2009).
For the full story, see Appreciating Assets, a sister publication
from Carnegie UK Trust www.carnegieuk.org; and the work of
C2 is described at www.healthempowermentgroup.org.uk
Cornish Pipes

54
business, farms. The approach surfaces old local stories
– as well as encouraging the invention of new ones.
Working with stories in this way can help to shift ‘stuck’
ways of seeing a place, to realising instead its potential.
Launching a report on place-based learning at a Carnegie
event in Cashel, Ireland, Will told a story about how his
experiences as a teacher – where he saw children being
encouraged to get ‘up and out’ of their community to ‘get
on’ – led him to search for a way to enable local young
people to stay:
Schooling often encourages young people
to reject their home communities and to
seek elsewhere for the ‘good life’ depicted
by the media.... Media
and advertising reinforce
individualism which
inevitably leads to uprooting,
lack of participation,
economic dependency and
community breakdown.
By extending the boundaries of the classroom to include
the whole local area, place-based learning immerses
students in local heritage, culture, landscapes, enterprises,
and all the many assets, seen and unseen, of a place. This
kind of approach can help young people become more
confident in taking responsibility for growing the vitality
and resilience of the places. As we saw in the section
on personal resilience, it is therefore a promising area
for policy innovators to explore as we investigate how
young people might be encouraged to get more involved
in resilience-building. This was a message first mooted
by Carnegie UK Trust in its Charter for Rural Community
Development (2007):
Governments, the curriculum
development agencies, local
education authorities and
the teaching profession
to support place-based
education as a cross cutting
feature of the primary and
secondary curriculum in rural
schools
Resilience through craft revival:
the GalGael Trust, Govan
Place-based learning is about practical application
of skills – and can include reviving skills that may be
in danger of being lost. In Govan, Glasgow, there is
an inspiring initiatives that shows the power of this
philosophy in action – and how everyone (not just
younger people) can benefit.
Trust founders Gehan and Colin Macleod realised that
after the closure of the Govan shipyards that unemployed
master wood craftsmen could be brought together with
a younger generation of long-term unemployed people,
many with drugs and alcohol habits, to share skills and
establish a ground-breaking social enterprise which has
revived an ancient tradition of Birlinn
(a form of Viking longship) building
on the Clyde.
Whereas long-term unemployment can be a recipe for
loneliness and hopelessness, the GalGael have helped
many people to stay active, learn transferable skills, and
recover a sense of pride in belonging in Govan. In this way,
a negative cycle of depression is broken and a ‘beneficial
cycle’ of positive, practical action is taking its place.
Visit the GalGael today, and the sense of energy and hope
can be highly infectious, even in the face of depressing
news from the wider world media. GalGael is not a one off
‘project’ but a way of life for a growing community of locals
in Govan. Like many other stories in this book, the Trust
is a social enterprise, generating income based on the
artistic calibre and craft skills of local people.
Artists Rehearsing Resilience:
Tooting’s Trash-Catchers Carnival
the time is right for an urgent re-examination
from the widest possible perspective, of the
role creative expression already plays and
could play even further, in driving the social
innovations and in building the individual and
collective resilience we will need to survive
and thrive in an increasingly uncertain future
Clare Cooper, Mission Models Money
http://rural.
carnegieuktrust.
org.uk/
publications/
place-based_
learning_
report-_will_
coleman
The Carnegie
Commission for
Rural Community
Development
(2007) “A
Charter for Rural
Communities”
p63
www.galgael.org
see http://www.missionmodelsmoney.org.uk/

55
Although the London borough of Tooting can seem a
world away from rural Cornish villages where Will Coleman
and colleagues champion place-based learning, in both
places it is creative artists who are unlocking creative
cultural expression within local communities. Fiery Spirits
member Lucy Neil has described how she worked to
create a ‘Trash Catchers’ carnival involving a partnership
between Transition Tooting and two professional arts
organisations.
The idea was to draw hundreds of local people into the
streets – ‘reclaiming’ the A24 arterial High Road (which
carries 10 million cars a year) as a ‘community space’ one
Summer’s day. The celebration took a year to prepare.
Instead of throwing stuff away, people were encouraged
to keep it to be transformed into impressive, shiny
decorations, puppets and floats. The message would be
that it’s possible to transform every place into something
beautiful:
Nothing like this had happened before… over
one year we ran workshops in half terms
and put up publicity until people started to
say ‘heh this is happening – they are going to
shut the High Road!’. This quickly gathered a
sense of excitement and possibility … lots of
community groups and schools got involved….
The idea that it would be our own story… early
workshops writing, poetry, walking around
streets, food …
Lucy Neal, co-ordinator of the carnival (personal
communication)
In our interview, Lucy went on to describe how, as the
day neared, excitement mounted. One puppet was called
‘Our Lady of Tooting’; another was a ‘Sankofa’ bird which,
according to legend, could look forwards (to the future)
and backwards (to the past) in the same glance. Head
teachers allowed hundreds of local schoolchildren the day
off to participate. Although the traffic authority refused
permission to stop the traffic, so much momentum had
gathered that the event was unstoppable:
On the day itself the sun shone… and we
jettisoned idea of getting permission from
Transport for London. Instead we registered
as a direct action, and were given safe passage
by the local police…. We stopped traffic.
Lucy Neal, co-ordinator of the carnival (personal
communication)
800 ‘Carnivalisters’ processed down the High Road and
into a 50 acre green space that is usually inaccessible.
Local businesses and restaurants provided food for 1000
people for free, and people were handed out packets of
seeds – to grow new things to share in follow-up food
festivals.
When we invited Lucy Neal, the Carnival’s co-ordinator,
to reflect on what putting on a carnival had to do with
building community resilience, she was clear that in
her view resilience is fundamentally about harnessing
creativity: the carnival proved that local artists can be
deployed to harness the power of imagination -a crucial
resource for creating a low-carbon future. Neal stressed
that artist have many skills in co-ordination, planning, and
project management – and that local groups can benefit
from these too. And finally, Lucy stressed that the carnival,
in her mind, is a kind of rehearsal for a more resilient future
– in the same way that a theatre company rehearses in the
weeks and months before a performance, a community
that is rehearsed before a crunch time has a far better
chance of not fluffing its lines:
…. We don’t get these opportunities very often
– but they are critical times to see ourselves
differently: they are points of re-invention,
renewal, and of giving our imagination the
chance to fly …we think ”If I can do that, then
what else can I do?” It’s an experience of joy –
a radical force… it shows that the community
is able to do far more than it may believe
itself to be capable of… and it showed how
artists can help to raise the game in terms of
ambition, aesthetic, organisation – helping
people to do something they never dreamed
they would be capable of.
Lucy Neal, personal communication

56
2.6 Cross-Community Links: ‘no community can go it alone’
It is very important that communities
recognise their interdependence with other
resilient communities and not trying to do
an isolated island because that’s not going to
work and that is going to cause conflict
- participant, FierySpirits Community of Practice
Despite current ads and slogans, the world
does not change one person at a time. It
changes as networks of relationships form
among people who discover they share a
common cause and vision of what is possible
.... Rather than worry about critical mass,
our work is to foster
critical connections’
Margaret Wheatley, author
of Using Emergence to take
Social Innovations to Scale
God forbid that India should ever take to
industrialism after the manner of the West.
The economic imperialism of a single tiny
island kingdom is today keeping the world in
chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took
to similar economic exploitation, it would
strip the world bare like locusts.
Mahatma Gandhi (1928)
In the past traders, monks, wandering minstrels and
more all brought news from the outside world to people
who rarely travelled far themselves. Today, the globalised
economy and internet mean that many take for granted
instant access to news, online shops, and the ability to
stay in touch with friends who may live very far away.
However, there are down-sides. Instead of too little
information, the experience of the internet can feel like
we’re drowning in it. And there are many, especially in
remote and rural communities, who aren’t able to access
technology and services.
A key finding of the 2007 Carnegie Commission was that
rural community activists – which the report called ‘Fiery
Spirits’ – often feel isolated. It called on governments to
support networking opportunities for rural activists, building
on the powerful experience of LEADER (a European Union
initiative) which has demonstrated how networks can
kick-start rural regeneration across Europe. Today, there are
many good examples of such networks. For example:
. Scotland’s National Rural Network
(http://www.ruralgateway.org.uk/) is a Scottish
Government initiative benefitting from significant
funding from Europe;
. Transition Network (http://www.transitionnetwork.org)
is another inspiration: a bottom-up initiative resourced
primary from the passion, skills and dedication of
volunteers; meanwhile
. ‘Our Society: Social action. Honest exchange.
Grounded learning’ (http://oursociety.org.uk/) has
begun to cause a stir; and
. Project Dirt (http://www.projectdirt.com) – an
initiative of the Low Carbon Communities Network
– shows how even in cities networking can bring
communities closer together
This chapter explores
how these and other
resilience-building
networks (including
www.fieryspirits.
com) can help
to build cross-
community links in
support of greater
community resilience
everywhere.
http://www.
margaretwheatley.com/
articles/emergence.html
The transition towns movement is a powerful example of
an international grassroots network that is beginning to
transform places on the basis of a hard-headed analysis
of the local risks from the future impacts of the combined
global trends of climate change and peak oil production.
Self-organising groups tackle the initiatives they are most
interested in, informed by a whole community ‘energy descent
action plan’ which has set a guiding vision for how local
people can take responsibility for building resilience over a
period of twenty years or so. This ‘scenarios’ approach to
community planning is a feature of many community
resilience initiatives and resources.

57
‘Imaginal cells’: the power of
a good network
Davie Philip is a natural networker – a passion for
promoting sustainability has motivated him to spend
twenty years convening hundreds of events throughout
Ireland. Davie is a member of many cross-cutting
networks – and has been an active member of fieryspirits.
com since its inception. During a workshop at the Centre
for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, Wales, he
shared some of the inspiration behind his work by using
the metaphor of a butterfly: “After eating hundreds of
times its own weight, the caterpillar forms its chrysalis
and inside its body new cells start forming – called
imaginal discs. At first the discs find it hard to survive the
caterpillar’s immune system – but soon they multiply and
connect – and the butterfly emerges”.
We learned from Davie about how even a small group of
under-resourced but committed people can have a big
impact. We made a connection to the novelist William
Gibson’s phrase ‘the future is here, it’s just not widely
distributed yet’ as Davie invited us to see ourselves as
‘imaginal discs’, beavering away in our own places, and
yet sensing how important it is to connect together to
build a strong community resilience movement: “as the
old structures of society break down thousands upon
thousands of us are already living the future – and it’s
better than what we’ve got today!”. The session seemed
to fire us up. The butterfly metaphor had helped us to
glimpse why networking is such a crucial part of effective
community resilience building.
Resilience’s ‘dark side’: why no
community should try to ‘go it alone’
This book opened with the story of how Hurricane Katrina
revealed fault-lines between New Orleans communities:
wealthier residents escaped whilst many poorer people
perished. We suggested that community resilience is not
about establishing easy ‘escape routes’ for the rich, but
rather building connections between communities, often
within the same city or region.
Throughout our workshops, the imperative of social justice
was raised repeatedly. On one occasion, a participant raised
the question of a ‘dark side’ to community resilience: of
places that ‘bunker down’, fighting change – especially that
which is perceived as being imposed by outsiders:
Sometimes the idea of resilience reminds
me of Dr. Strangelove – build a big bunker
underground to perpetuate the race…
Participant, Dunfermline seminar
She was referring to Stanley Kubrick’s cult film Dr.
Strangelove (1964), where a war room full of politicians
and generals frantically try to prevent a paranoid general,
USAF Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (played by Peter
Sellers), from starting a nuclear war. In one memorable
scene, Ripper explains his warped logic:
General Jack D. Ripper: Mandrake, do you recall
what Clemenceau once said about war?
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: No, I don’t think
I do, sir, no. General Jack D. Ripper: He said
war was too important to be left to the
generals. When he said that, 50 years ago,
he might have been right. But today, war is
too important to be left to politicians. They
have neither the time, the training, nor
the inclination for strategic thought. I can
no longer sit back and allow Communist
infiltration, Communist indoctrination,
Communist subversion and the international
Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all
of our precious bodily fluids.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and
Love the Bomb (1964)

58
Sellers’ brilliant portrayal the twisted psychology of war
touched a nerve – and helped the film become a cult
classic. General Ripper would have seen his actions as
defending his nation’s resilience – whilst all the while blind
to the bigger impact of nuclear Armageddon.
We agreed that this reference helpfully raised questions
about a ‘dark’ side to resilience: how, in a scenario of
community conflict and break-down, the idea of ‘resilience’
could be misused to garner support for extremist politics.
As the conversation turned to the British National Party’s
messages of repelling
outsiders and scape-goating
minorities, we also asked
ourselves whether we
hadn’t secretely also asked
ourselves ‘what would we do
if it all goes pear-shaped?’.
Would we gang together and
head to the hills with some
guns, like the cannibal gangs
in the film The Road?
Shortly after we met, the IPPR released a report (April
2010) that examined why the British National Party
seemed to be gaining ground in some constituencies. In
most communities in England, the IPPR study found, it is
not the direct experience of immigration, but “the slow-
burning mixture of frustration, isolation and sense of
powerlessness people are
feeling in some communities”.
A flavour of our conversation continued at other events.
By and large, the conclusion was that it is most healthy
to be aware of this possible ‘dark’ side to a resilience
agenda: it may help to remind residents of wealthier areas
that it may well be fruitless to develop an all-singing and
dancing resilient community initiative if, down the road,
‘frustration, isolation and powerlessness’ is building into
pent-up rage. No community, we conclude, can or should
try to ‘go it alone’: resilience, we realise, is a function of
a community’s capacity to foster diverse connections to
other places, near and far. We now look at some ways this
can be done.
Local food: catalysing global
networking and solidarity
You can’t just have one resilient town, you
need to link into other communities, and their
learning…
Mike Small, Fife Diet
Whilst rich countries are responsible for most
of the emissions pumped into the atmosphere
it is the poorest communities in the world that
are being hit the hardest by climate change.
But rather than providing compensation for
causing climate change rich countries are
using it to trap the world’s poor into new and
dangerous debt.
World Development Movement (WDM) ‘Climate Debt’
campaign at http://www.wdm.org.uk/climatedebt
In the face of historic and continuing profligacy of
resource use by the rich world, we have found that many
people we have met who are working to build local
community resilience in the UK and Ireland are also active
supporters of organisations such as WDM and the Fair
Trade movement.
In 2009, Tipperary Institute (based in Thurles) host a large
scale community resilience event as part our Community
of Practice. Many of the presentations advocated for local
food activism as a powerful starting-place for community
resilience initiatives. Some also stressed a global food
justice imperative: they are motivated to find a new
system, beyond inequitable trade and the domination
of the international food system by a small number of
multinational companies.
This scenario has
been painted in many
‘doomsday’ films over the
years, such as The Road
and Day of the Triffids. It
has been vividly animated
in Leo Murray’s excellent
short film Wake Up, Freak
Out and tipping points in
climate change: http://
wakeupfreakout.org/film/
tipping.html
http://www.ippr.org.uk/
pressreleases/?id=3957

59
From Transition Town Totnes, Devon, Rob Hopkins showed
maps of the region that showed the ‘food footprints’ of local
settlements to try to answer the question ‘can Totnes feed
itself?’. Mike Small, from the Fife Diet project in Scotland,
told us
how
they had
spent the
previous year experimenting with whether they could
survive on a diet sourced 85% locally: they had held dinners,
swapped recipes, received offers of land for allotments, and
learned a lot about how difficult it is to buy local – even from
farmers in the same village. We also heard how another
Fife initiative – One Planet Food – is attempting to take
lessons from the Fife Diet as well as ideas being generated
by an international
peasant movement,
Via Campesina, to
influence regional
and national food
policy:
a community
with a lot of bonding social capital but no
bridging capital is not very resilient when
faced with an unfamiliar problem – it doesn’t
know who to ask … and it is important to
know who to ask who is not from your local
community if you are going to be more
resilient
Pete Ritchie, Farmer and One Planet Food programme
The event made it clear that food is one of the most
powerful starting points for community resilience
initiatives – and by the final session, two new groups
were swapping
notes about plans
to start a ‘Munster
Diet’ and a
‘Cornish Diet’.
Evidence from our conference in Tipperary suggests how
powerful cross-community linking can be – especially
when we make the local-global connections. It also
shows how simple, catchy ideas like a Fife Diet has the
capacity to ‘go viral – inspiring others near and far. As our
Community of Practice develops, these are lessons we are
learning from.
http://transitionculture.org/2010/07/27/
can-totnes-feed-itself-a-section-from-my-
forthcoming-thesis/
The ‘Food Sovereignty’ report
is available at http://www.
centreforstewardship.org.uk/
oneplanetfood.htm. See also a video
snapshot of a project co-ordinated
by St. Andrews University aiming
to catalyse similar outcomes:
http://fieryspirits.com/video/fife-
councilcommunity-food
The Fife Diet is at http://www.
fifediet.co.uk/; Cornish diet is
at http://www.transitionnc.org/
node/45; Tipperary Diet news is at
http://tipptatler.ie/?p=1784
Section 2 – Building more
resilient communities – guided by
a compass of community resilience
Summary Points
1 Community Resilience is a youthful and vibrant
field. This handbook offers a ‘compass’ of
community resilience to make it easier to navigate
the many toolkits, stories, theories and definitions
that already exist.
2 Achieving ‘break through’ resilience will likely involve
high levels of creativity, co-ordination and even fun
across four dimensions of personal, cultural, economic
and inter-community collaboration.
3 Personal resilience is an active process of ‘self
righting’ involving feeling in control of life, getting fit,
and being positively engaged in community life.
4 Local economies can ‘plug the leaks’ by stewarding
their own energy, water, money, housing, food and
other resources.
5 Creativity, fun and a strong and inclusive sense of
identity, belonging and place are at the heart of
cultural resilience.
6 No community can or should try to ‘go it alone’ –
more resilient communities are learning how best to
support other places when needed.
Next steps
We hope you have found this handbook useful and
stimulating. As a next step, why not:
1) Try out the 'resilience compass' in your own
community. See Appendix 2 for a sample workshop.
2) Offer feedback via www.fieryspirits.com
3) Follow updates via twitter – @comresilience

60
Appendix 1: Events
informing this book
Sense of Place, Eden
September 2009
Attendees at a ‘Sense of Place’ talked about building a strong ‘sense
of belonging’ – and how this can help build community resilience
too. Presenters’ stories included creating a Cornish language school
curriculum, re-inventing local festivals in Cumbria to bring life back to
villages, baking bread from local ingredients in Fife, and many many
more captured using ‘graphic facilitation’ (see right).
Power and Place conference, CAT
October 2009
CAT hosted the Power and Place conference in addition to a series
of seminars on writing a new ‘Zero Carbon Britain’ report, with
the idea of showing, very practically, how the UK economy could
make a transition capable of preventing runaway climate change.
CAT’s emphasis is on ‘transition technologies’ showcased pioneer
communities who are pioneering locally appropriate solutions to
transport, energy etc.. Two presenters went on to share a £1 million
prize from NESTA’s Big Green Challenge later in the year.
‘Resilience’ Ceiluradh,
Tipperary Institute
Oct. 2009
Ireland is suffering badly from the credit crunch. House prices in free
fall and a government crisis coping with crippling debt, with public
sector workers having to accept big pay cuts. This was the back-
drop to TI’s annual Ceiluradh themed ‘resilience’. Food, money and
community innovation were big topics. A major part of this event
included workshops where all delegates did some hard thinking about
to to build resilience in their context. Report available from TI, as well
as a video summary on fieryspirits.com.

61
Resilience Seminar,
Dunfermline
November 2009
A day long event brought together 25 participants from the online
resilience discussion group for a rich, engaging conversation. The
small group size, careful facilitation, and quality contributions made for
a productive session which identified some question themes (picture,
right) to follow up on.
Carnegie Rural Programme
Annual Gathering, Kendal
November 2009
We met at the time of the Cockermouth and Workington floods. As part
of the event, I hosted a workshop for 90 minutes for about fifty people.
We began we small group work – exchanging views on resilience –
then opened out a wider conversation which we captured on video.
Carnegie Annual Gathering,
Hill Holt Wood, Lincolnshire
October 2010
A group of twelve experienced practitioners met to help to shape this
document, bringing case stories and insights from different sectors,
jurisdictions, disciplines and practice areas. Our conversations
were wide ranging and turned up useful new thinking such as
the importance of ‘rehearsing’ resilience… and the importance of
connecting rural and urban community agendas.

62
Appendix 2:
Resilience Compass
Community Workshop
Brain-storming a local index of resilience can be very helpful for
communities starting down the track (or indeed reviewing progress to
date) of building greater resilience. This Appendix suggests a sample
format for how to run a starter session of 90 minutes with about 12
people, using the compass of resilience introduced in Part Two of
this book:
1 Welcome participants and invite people to talk in pairs or threes about a real
life experience where they have learned something about ‘resilience’. Next, ask
participants to feedback any insights from the experiences they shared. Ask each
speaker to be brief, and to note down the insights in a way that everyone can see
them (a flipchart laid flat on a central table can work well). After everyone who wants
a go has had a chance to report back, switch chairs and ask people whether they see
any common themes in what’s been said (30 minutes).
2 Briefly introduce the ‘Resilience Compass’ in a way that makes sense to you (using
your own examples, ideally). Ask whether people would like to experiment with seeing
if it can add anything to the insights that have just been noted down. The idea will
be to invent labels for the compass that are unique to your place! If people aren’t
interested, don’t force the suggestion. Instead, see where the ensuring discussion
leads! (5 minutes).
3 Hand out copies of the blank compass (see next page). Invite participants to self-
organise into four groups of three, with the task of rapidly coming up with locally
relevant labels that explain the break through, break even and break down stages
under each heading ‘people’, ‘culture’, ‘economy’ and ‘links’. It might help to
brainstorm these into a table to begin with (generic example below) (15 minutes)
Break Through Break Even Break Down
People
Feel excited by change;
take risks; active learning
Feel in control and able
to plan ahead
Feel isolated and cautious
Culture
Re-create local story to
fit changing times
Celebrate sense of place
belonging
Only consuming outsider culture
Economy
Localised economy, many
‘virtuous circles’
Diverse infrastructure
and organisations
Too many eggs in one basket
Links
Pro-active cross-community
collaboration
Networking with
like-minded folk
Survivalism: hunker down

63
4 Next, keep everyone in groups and ask them to consider each axis in turn: how well
are we doing in our community? By the end of the conversation, there should be one
coloured in compass per group (sample, below). (5 minutes)
5 Now bring the groups back together and each briefly reports back. Take time to
notice any similarities or differences between the labels the groups came up with, and
the shapes of the diagrammes that have been drawn on the compasses. (10 minutes)
6 Spend time de-briefing the exercise. Was it helpful? Did it throw any new light on
the local situation? How about involving the wider community as well – perhaps
each person present could conduct two or three small focus groups with friends
and neighbours, and bring all the compasses back to a future meeting. If the group
decides to go in this direction, why not ask local people to map the untapped
potential ofthe community at the same time? It might generate some great ideas for
taking next steps towards ‘break through’ resilience!
7 If this exercise worked for you, how about writing a blog about how it went at
fieryspirits.com, suggesting improvements to this workshop? Feel free to contact
nick@carnegieuk.org for help on how to do this.
People
Culture Economy
Links

64
Compass Worksheet
Break Through Break Even Break Down
People
Culture
Economy
Links
People
Culture Economy
Links

Appendix 3:
Break-through in the
life-cycle of organisations
In Part One of this book, we pointed to the Training for Transformation
resources that were compiled by Anne Hope and Sally Timmel, building on
Paulo Freire’s insights into popular education. In the third book in the series,
the authors introduce a ‘parabola model’ that helps to describe the life cycles
of projects and organisations in communities. The diagramme below adapts
the parabola model to show typical points of break even, break through and
break down in such a cycle:
The parabola model is designed to be read from left to
right: it describes typical steps that pioneers follow as they
establish new organisations, groups or even communities.
There are several lessons that can be drawn. For example,
even if a community feels things are going reasonably well
– ‘breaking even’ – it would be wrong to grow complacent.
Instead, this is the time to get ready for a new burst of
innovation and creativity. Building regular cycles of action
and reflection (action research) can help with this.
The parabola also reveals lessons for founders of initiatives.
For example, it shows why succession planning is vital
to ensure that an organisation isn’t overly constrained by
existing ways of working. If the life goes out of a community
of organisation (the red curve), doubts can creep in. The
longer these doubts are not brought to the surface and
addressed, the deeper they can become until people may
wonder if the organisation should still exist. The Training for
Transformation manuals identify three stages of doubt down
the red slope: operational, strategic and ethical.
See Training for Transformation (ITG)
book 3, page 85. For an exploration in
greater depth of the evolutionary dynamics
of living systems and the implications for
leadership development, read Peter Merry
Evolutionary Leadership available from
http://www.integralleadershipreview.
com/book/book-merry-peter.php
65
SHOCK
Break
Through
Vision/Dream
Values
Assets
Priorities
Action
Stop
Look
Think
Change
Break
Even
New
Break
Through
Break
Down
Death/
Rebirth

Published by Fiery Spirits Community of Practice
supported by Carnegie UK Trust.
Head Office
Andrew Carnegie House
Pittencrieff Street
Dunfermline
Fife KY12 8AW
www.carnegieuktrust.org.uk
Download and comment on this
publication at www.fieryspirits.com
Contact: nick@carnegieuk.org
www.fieryspirits.com
Lively, easy to understand and
packed with useful metaphors
and practical tools for applying
resilience thinking
Community activist (Scotland)
The compass model is very
useable … really beneficial
in my work supporting local
community leaders
Community development worker (Ireland)
Brings home different
aspects of resilience … the section
on resilience and creativity is
inspiring!
Social entrepreneur (England)
Inspiring stories that make
the theory come alive – and a
theoretical framework that makes
sense of the stories
Sustainability Academic (Wales)
I love the ‘commitment to
bringing people together who
didn’t know they needed to meet’ –
it’s the guiding principle for the
handbook
Foundation professional (England)
£9.95
Carnegie United Kingdom Trust
Scottish charity SC012799 operating in the UK and Ireland
Incorporated by Royal Charter 1917

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