At the forefront of community resilience
October 16, 2025
Cumbria CVS’s Community Resilience Coordinator, Liam Ryan, reflects on our successful Community Resilience event in Rheged on the 8th of October, and as storm season begins, how communities across Cumbria are stepping up their resilience efforts. From local workshops to innovative flood response strategies, collaboration is key. Read how we’re supporting communities to prepare for emergencies and build a stronger future together.
It’s that time of year again.
The nights are drawing in, the days are getting colder, and those of us who live in areas prone to flooding or other natural catastrophes have started to nervously watch the weather forecast for things to come. We’ve already had the first named storm of the season but talking to colleagues who live and work in places like Appleby and Kendal it’s clear that a more serious incident passed unnamed a month ago.
While forecasting and monitoring become more effective every year, there’s nothing quite like keeping an eye on things for yourself, making use of the various alert and warning systems in place around you, and preparing ahead for if the worst happens.
In many ways community resilience is very much part of our business as usual in the charity sector. We’re experts in bringing people together, thinking creatively about solutions to problems, and making straightforward cost effective plans that place people at their centre. What we do as a sector should always be based on equality, supportiveness, and collaboration; these principles are key to resilience planning and sit at the heart of how communities work together in emergencies and beyond.
Cumbria is strong because it must be. Every projection around climate change places Cumbria at the forefront of things like increased rainfall and river levels and we’ve already seen many of our communities devastated by flooding in the last twenty years.
Our landscape can make us vulnerable to power cuts and heavy snowfall; while these tend to be short term, they can have a massive impact on our lives and developments such as Digital Switchover in telecoms have added an extra layer of vulnerability for people living in areas with poor mobile phone signals. Finally, the era of COVID is still fresh in everyone’s memory and, while Cumbrian communities rose to the occasion and supported one another through that, it was a painful and difficult time for everyone.
It’s not all doom and gloom however. Cumbria is well recognised as being at the forefront of community resilience and there’s fantastic collaboration across the sector and with colleagues in the public and private sectors. A group of sixty committed individuals from communities and responder organisations came together at Rheged on the 8th October to learn together through workshops and scenarios.
This was only the first of many similar events that we’ll hold over the next year with the aim of bringing together communities and professionals to understand each other’s roles and plan how to complement each other’s work in emergencies. The following day I attended a great conference on land management that was organised by my colleagues from the Cumbria Innovative Flood Response programme that showcased new ways of working with the land to reduce flood risk.
At the heart of this lies our communities and what they can do for themselves to mitigate risk and plan ahead. We have a strong support offer that sits alongside that of our colleagues from the local authorities and Action with Communities in Cumbria. We also work with colleagues from Cumbria Community Foundation to oversee a grant scheme aimed at supporting communities to be more resilient, particularly those affected by flooding, which most are to some extent.
We’re already talking to many communities who’d like to think ahead about resilience but we’d like to reach more. We’re open to discussion with any group or individual with an interest in resilience, whether they be parish councils, religious groups, community centre committees, or anyone within a community who’d like a chat about this.
I can be contacted at liam.ryan@cumbriacvs.org.uk and would encourage anyone with an interest to drop me an email.
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