Trustees: weavers of community resilience

For the last few years as we enter Trustees week, I have penned some short thought-provoking articles to lift us above the ‘here and now’, of the challenges facing the sector and something trustees can do to positively address these challenges. This year, I will be turning my spotlight on the role that trustees play as builders of community resilience.  Now, this year’s article wouldn’t be so thought-provoking had I not included two words in its title, namely, ‘community’, and ‘resilience’.  Why are these words likely to be so thought provoking and why are trustees set to play a significant role in the challenges they present?

So, let us start with word, ‘community’, (we will save resilience until later as it is gets even more interesting).  Community is one of these words that is bandied about and means different things to different people. Commonly, we use the term community to embrace a collection of people living in a place, (‘The Community’) but equally, it could be a community of faith or, sporting interests or, age …and the list goes on. Worse, you can be a member of more than community at the same time or different times! So, at best a ‘community’ may well be no more than a blanket term that describes some relationship between people in a particular context.  From a charity trustee perspective, this idea of relationships is going to be crucial to describing how they can help build more resilient communities but before we explore this more fully, we next turn to resilience.

Resilience is an even more bandied about word, (and this is where I promised it is going to get more interesting from a trustee’s perspective so please read on). My observation is that on the whole most people associate resilience with – personal or otherwise - is an ability to keep going or bounce back from adversity. True, this is part of a definition of resilience but, resilience is a two-sided coin.  

There is a ‘reactive’ type of resilience which was well documented by the sector taking the hammer-blow of Covid 19 and keeping going. It kept delivering services alongside other agencies to some of the most vulnerable in society.  Yet, there is a ‘proactive’ type of resilience and this is much less explored yet, in the same way that you can’t have a one-sided coin, you can’t have a one-sided view of resilience because, you need both as a trustee to build more resilient communities.

What is ‘proactive resilience’ and why is it something that Trustees should start to explore? At a recent Scottish conference on resilient communities, I was asked to describe why I thought resilience was important in this context. For me, resilience is the weft and warp of the fabric of the society we live in or aspire to living in. We can make whatever patterns we like on that weft and warp to suit local needs but, without a strong weft and a warp upon which to make a pattern, we have nothing more than a collection of threads. 

Let me describe a real example of a situation that screams out for proactive resilience and where the sector could make a real difference by exploring proactive resilience further.  A locality not far from me is faced with an ageing population. This is widely known and almost every agency acknowledges this to be the case. Yet, this isn’t another pandemic – it is something that has been happening for the last ten years and is likely to reach a tipping point in the next 20 years. Young people are leaving in droves, prospective employers find it less attractive, healthcare is going to be affected and a whole host of other issues are likely to raise their head. Everyone seems to know about it but, nobody has mentioned the elephant in room!  So how can proactive resilience help address this?

Need seldom travels alone. Using the above example from the perspective of an ageing population we can see these ‘fellow travellers’ such as: health and infirmity needs; Isolation, loneliness and social exclusion needs; Transport needs; access to food and resources needs and you can probably keep adding to this list.  And by reversing the perspective from the viewpoint of the remaining non-elderly population in the area, you see another bus-load of ‘fellow traveller’ needs emerging.

So as a charity trustee how do you help in a practical way to weave a stronger social ‘weft and warp’ and build more resilient communities?  

The starting point is to focus NOW – not tomorrow – on YOUR role in making your charity more resilient. So, practically that means examining your funding base and sources, exploring the boundaries of your charitable objects and how you might be creative within these – or change them, recruiting and retaining board talent whilst looking at different and diverse skills you will need as a board – and looking at the routes to trusteeship in your charity.  

The second part is to start examining or re-examining your strategy to look further and wider at how the world is likely to affect your mission over the next five to 10 years – how will the world be likely to act on you and how are you going to respond to these changes intelligently? You will likely have your own examples of the ‘elephant in the room’ that I used in the example above and these need to be addressed. 

Lastly, and this is the where you as a charity trustee becomes a ‘weaver’ of the weft and warp of community resilience – namely by exploring who else and what else is needed to make that ‘pattern’, on the fabric of your local area or community?  How can those ‘fellow travellers’ of different needs be better addressed with an integrated response between yourselves and others in the sector locally (or nationally)? By starting with a bigger and wider conversation, possibilities will emerge and then you can turn to the resource’s issues. For sure, community resilience will never be built on kind words alone but, in tough economic times, searching for ways to collaborate and use resources better has got to be a sensible approach.  Efficiency goes beyond doing more of the same with equal or fewer resources. It is also about getting the right services to the right recipients in the right amounts at the right time!

As a charity trustee there is often more than enough in the ‘day job’ of governing your charity and we are fortunate in the UK to have so many committed and able charity trustees giving willingly of their skills and expertise.  Sometimes though, changing perspective slightly can helps to clarify some of the ‘here and now’ or, opens a different vista that shows new possibilities and opportunities.

My sincere thanks and I wish you well as you help weave that important pattern on the weft and warp. 

Written by Stephen Cahill, our Regional Manager for Scotland and volunteer lead.