Preparing your community

Community resilience

At the very beginning of an emergency, communities may have to cope on their own until help arrives.

Community emergency planning and resilience is about empowering communities, businesses and individuals to use local people, resources and knowledge to help themselves and communities during an emergency.

This could be before, during or after the emergency services arrive.

Resilience is about being aware of risks that might impact the community, individual, or business and planning and preparing for them, to minimise the impact and disruption.

Many communities spontaneously help one another in times of need and communities who have prepared in advance are able to cope better and recover faster.

We understand the importance for communities to be able to respond to, withstand and recover from adverse incidents and held a community forum to support town and parish councils and key interested parties in planning how to help their communities become more resilient.

See the Community resilience (PDF) [15MB] presentation.

How to prepare

There are many ways you can help prepare for an emergency response so that you are:

aware of the risks which may affect your community and what the impact would be
able to assist and complement the work of local emergency services
able to use your existing skills, knowledge and resources to provide support to others

See further useful information on preparing for emergencies.

Community plan

A community plan helps identify the local risks that may affect the community and the skills and resources available to prepare for, respond to and recover for an adverse incident.

It will help all volunteers know their roles when there's an emergency and can be shared with emergency services and us so that everyone can work together. There are lots of places to get advice on developing your community plan including this Community Emergency Plan Template (Word doc) [1MB] .

Contact us

You can contact us at eandr@nfdc.gov.uk, or telephone: 023 8028 5411.