Ready Together: The evidence base for enhancing Community Resilience in the UK

Context

The National Emergencies Trust is developing a Community Resilience Toolkit and Strategy to support the creation of a whole-of-society model of community resilience across the United Kingdom.

While the UK benefits from a highly capable professional emergency response system, experience from recent crises has shown that outcomes are often shaped by the strength of everyday civic capacity - local relationships, trusted networks and community leadership. This programme aims to capture what works in community-led resilience and turn that learning into a practical framework that complements the existing emergency system.

The project will identify, examine and bring together examples of effective practice, translating them into practical guidance that can be used by communities, voluntary organisations, local authorities and resilience partners across the four nations.

A research team at NTU will undertake a multi-perspective research project to ensure Ready Together's Toolkit and Modules are evidence-informed and reviewed by sector experts. Future stages of this project will focus on evaluating and adapting the strategy and toolkit through a test and learn approach.

Our approach

The project will review evidence about community resilience through four complementary evidence-review workstreams. The work combined structured academic database searching with policy, government, organisational, grey literature, and real-world practice searching.

The workstreams will be:

• Collective Action, Community Action and Community Organising
• Community Resilience, Societal Resilience
• Social Identity Theory (Groups)
• Lived Experience Examples/Leading Practice

This material will be stress-tested with experts who have been through more than 155 emergencies, practitioner groups and academic expertise groups and a two-location youth advisory board that will be facilitated by the Kings Trust.

On completion of these evidence reviews, the research team will support colleagues from the National Emergencies Trust to develop the modules and toolkit ahead of launching the toolkit in October 2026.

Outputs

Ready Together Toolkit: www.readytogether.co,uk

Further written outputs and an evaluation of the early stages of the project's rollout will be made available here.

If you want to understand preparedness and what it means for you and your communities, we have put together an explainer page and video.

You can also listen to Professor Hill discuss why we should all be more prepared via our ReFrame podcast episode:  From climate change to war: why being prepared for emergencies is our responsibility

The Team

Professor Rowena Hill leads this research project, supported by Dr Blerina Kellezi, Professor Mustafa Sarkar, and Rich Pickford.

The wider research team included Rebecca Ciarla, Miniodi Gamage, Abbi Exon, Huboor Sheikh and Paul Netherton.

It was only made possible with support from the whole National Emergencies Trust team, with special mention going to Ben Sefton, Anna McConnell, Francesca Lamarque and Mhari Sharp