When curiosity is the start of conversations about resilience

One of the things I love most about working in resilience is that increasingly I’m meeting people who are curious. Curious about how things could work better. Curious about what others bring to the table. Curious enough to step outside their own organisational boundaries and ask, “What if we approached this differently?”

For me, that curiosity is where resilience begins and is the theme I’ll be bringing to conversations at The Emergency Services Show and its new Local Resilience Forum conference in September.  There is a growing recognition across the Resilience community that the challenges we face are becoming more complex, more interconnected and, frankly, less interested in our organisational structures. Communities don’t experience emergencies through the lens of responder categories, funding streams or governance arrangements. They experience them as people, families, neighbours and local networks.

That’s why partnership matters. Not as a buzzword, but as a practical necessity and that’s exactly why a new event from my organisation, the Voluntary and Community Sector Emergencies Partnership, called EP:LIVE feels so important.

There are many conferences that talk about resilience. Taking place on 8 October in Leeds, what makes EP:LIVE different is that it recognises something we in the VCSEP have long understood: communities are not just beneficiaries of resilience. They are leaders in it.

To my knowledge, EP:LIVE is the only resilience conference that places the role of community leadership so firmly at its heart. That matters because resilience doesn’t start when professional responders arrive. It starts long before. It starts in trusted relationships, local knowledge, community organisations, faith groups, neighbourhood networks and volunteers who know their places and their people. These are not peripheral assets within the resilience ecosystem. They are fundamental to it. Yet too often, the conversations we have about resilience focus on institutions rather than the relationships that connect them.

Building bridges

EP:LIVE is an opportunity to build those connections. It is a place for bridge builders. People who are interested in bringing together community leaders, emergency services, local authorities, health partners, voluntary organisations, and businesses. People who understand that none of us can solve today’s challenges alone. People who know that better outcomes come from working across boundaries rather than defending them.

As Director for the VCSEP, I have the privilege of seeing what happens when those bridges are built well. I see organisations sharing expertise, communities shaping solutions, and partnerships achieving things that would simply not be possible in isolation. I also know there is much more we can learn from one another and that’s why curiosity matters.

The best resilience conversations are rarely the ones where everyone agrees. They’re the ones where people come together with different perspectives, ask difficult questions, challenge assumptions and leave with a new understanding of what’s possible. EP:LIVE will create exactly that kind of space.

For those who are joining the LRF Conference at the NEC on 16 September, EP:LIVE on 8 October is a natural next step in the conversation. It offers an opportunity to move beyond recognising the importance of community resilience and into exploring how we strengthen it together with leaders and experts in the communities we’re talking about.

We will be talking about how we create more meaningful partnerships, share power and insight and build a resilience system that genuinely reflects the strengths that already exist within our communities. Ultimately, resilience is not something that organisations deliver to communities, it is something we build with them.

I’m looking forward to meeting fellow bridge builders, learning from fresh perspectives and continuing the conversation. Most of all, I’m looking forward to exploring what becomes possible when we put community leadership exactly where it belongs: at the centre of resilience. Join us in Leeds, the final tranche of tickets is on sale now.

Robyn is speaking at the Local Resilience Forum conference that takes place alongside The Emergency Services Show on 16 September at the NEC in Birmingham. You can snap up one of the final tickets for EP:LIVE that takes place in Leeds on 8 October by visiting the event website.