May 4, 2025

Someone pointed out to me last week that I must have now reached the milestone of 100 days as Chief Executive. Whilst I’ve seen some great posts on LinkedIn recently, where people have managed a selfie for each of those 100 days, I’m afraid I haven’t been!

So you’ll have to settle for my thoughts on one of the most exciting things that’s happened during those 100 days……

And at a personal level, that’s recruiting a new Community Resilience Coordinator, so I’m no longer trying to do two jobs at the same time. Welcome aboard, Liam!

Community Resilience is one of those things that’s pretty challenging to pin down; it can mean very different things to different people.

Sometimes it’s used simply to mean Community Emergency Planning, which is very valuable, but only part of the bigger picture. Increasingly, it’s used to cover a broader range of emergency preparedness, response and recovery activity, including work with individual households, community leaders and local businesses. And, in my experience, it can also be expanded to cover the tricky topics that don’t fit easily anywhere else, including poverty, and community tensions around hotels housing people seeking asylum. Maybe I’m just not very good at saying “no”?

Cumbria’s very clearly seen as leading the way around community resilience activity (and that goes back much further than my involvement, which started following Storm Desmond in 2015), perhaps because we seem to be at the centre of so many extreme weather events, as well as many other incidents. All of which means we’re often asked to help shape national and international work.

We helped to shape the national resilience website, and so the content now encourages people to get to know their neighbours, and become active in their community, as well as looking at more formal options such as volunteering for an organisation such as British Red Cross that responds during emergencies.

Not heard of the national resilience website? To be honest, it did get a bit lost. The Deputy Prime Minister announced its launch nearly a year ago, but then the Prime Minister announced a general election a couple of hours later. Guess which one grabbed the headlines?

But it’s well worth a look – you can find it here.

We’re also asked by Cabinet Office to input to work abroad; I’ve been involved in work to help not for profit organisations in Lithuania think about business continuity planning. That was online during the pandemic; I turned down a more recent trip to Rhodes to support planning around wildfires (but Alison, the Cumbria Local Resilience Forum Manager, picked up the baton). OK, maybe I can occasionally say “no”!

And this week, I’ve been near York, for the launch of the UK Resilience Academy, an evolution of the Cabinet Office Emergency Planning College which is designed to support organisations with the shift to building “Whole of Society Resilience”.

It was great to hear Cabinet Minister Pat McFadden acknowledge that inequalities can make it harder for some people to “be resilient” in his opening speech, as well as touching on the need to think about the more complex and longer risks that we seem to be facing more and more frequently – such as the power blackout across Spain and Portugal that we saw a little later in the day.

So, to finish, how are you, and your organisation, prepared for the main risks we face in Cumbria?

• Have you signed up for Met Office weather warnings, and Environment Agency Flood Warnings?
  Have you thought about how you’d communicate with friends and family (and staff and volunteers) if we lost power and phone services for a prolonged period?
  Have you considered the possibility of another pandemic?

For more information on Cumbria Local Resilience Forum, and the biggest risks we face in Cumbria, take a look at the Cumbria Prepared website.

And if you’ve got any questions, ask Liam (or me), and we’ll be able to help you, or at least point you in the right direction!
Liam.Ryan@cumbriacvs.org.uk / CarolynO@cumbriacvs.org.uk