What is Communities Prepared?
Communities Prepared is a National Lottery funded Groundwork programme that provides people and communities with the knowledge and confidence to prepare for, respond to and recover from a range of emergencies and, in-turn, foster long-term resilience. We combine multi-hazard volunteer training, including flooding, storms, wildfires, utility and snow, with community development workshops on topics including crisis recovery and community emergency planning.
As a programme run by Groundwork, we want every community to be strong and able to shape its own destiny in an increasingly risk-filled future. Thanks to our funding, our offer is free to community volunteers, and we are also regularly developing new collaborative projects with our partners (ranging from the Environment Agency to Local Resilience Forums and local authorities) to enable us to extend and customise our local offer through a variety of funding models and approaches.
Our Members Area
Our training is designed to be tailored to the specific needs, risks and priorities of local communities, and we’re proud that in October 2022 we launched the expanded members’ area of our website. This offers unlimited access to self-led online learning modules, registration for accompanying workshops, downloadable handbooks and our members’ forum.
Our events page details all of our national and regional webinars and workshops alongside any upcoming conferences or shows we are part of.
Building Resilience Together in partnership with British Red Cross and Aviva
The Communities Prepared programme includes the pilot project Building Resilience Together, a collaboration with British Red Cross, Aviva and local communities to develop community-led solutions through establishing local community resilience hubs that are integrated into LRF planning and activity. Head to the Building Resilience Together website to learn more.
Durham and Darlington LRF Innovation Fund Project
We are working with County Durham and Darlington Local Resilience Forum (LRF) on their DLUHC LRF Innovation Fund project, with a view to expanding this work to the national scale in due course. This will bring on-the-ground relationships together with a variety of learning opportunities, support, resilience mapping, ways of communicating with volunteer responders before and during an emergency, and the fostering of collaborative working through the sharing of data in order to strengthen emergency and community resilience.
Our Approach
Our intention is to be open and flexible to the needs and risks of local communities. This has involved codeveloping content for specific regions, working strategically within the sector to promote self-activation within communities, signposting as part of a network of organisations, delivering council contracts, working with commercial partners and more. Whether you are an individual volunteer, group leader or professional, we want to work together to meet your needs, and are flexible with how we approach this goal.
Register with us
The most direct way to understand our offer is to register as a member with us. Its quick, free and gives any user (individual, group or professional) access to our self-led online learning modules, handbooks and online webinar discussions in our calendar. Your data will not be used anywhere else and you will never be asked for your payment details.
Head to our website at www.communitiesprepared.org.uk to learn more or contact us at communitiesprepared@groundwork.org.uk with any queries.
