“How are you?” not “Who are you?”
Given the unpredictable nature of emergencies, Regional Engagement Manager — Becky Maynard writes about the importance to making the connections before we need them
This past year, although it has felt like we came to this side of COVID-19 a lot stronger as a society, there was definitely a sense of people and particularly the VCS of having to “get back to normal”. This meant a lot of organisations refocussing from emergency response back to their regular day-to-day activities. Emergency funding dwindled; volunteer capacity reduced as furlough ended and we found ourselves negotiating the “new normal”.
Transition and change for any organisation can be challenging, and this year we and our extended partnership have faced storms and floods, power outages, influxes of refugees, heatwaves and more. We are now rapidly heading towards winter where we have the potential perfect storm of extreme weather, power outages and a cost-of-living crisis.
In each response that we have been called on to support, such as floods and power outages, the Ukraine evacuation and the summer heatwaves. we have formed new bonds, engaged new partners with specific remits or skill sets to add to, alongside those the ever-growing make-up of the EP, and aimed to fill needs gaps by linking partners together. It is very hard to predict the severity of a crisis long in advance but one of the key objectives of the Emergencies Partnership over the year has been to bring people together and learn from each other.
A couple of highlights from this year have been seeing the partnership develop both in volume and quality — increasing the diversity of our partners has meant we are in a stronger position to support those harder to reach members of our community. It has also been incredibly heartening the lessons we have identified in after-action reviews resulting in best practice when we face further crises. This was particularly clear to see in the learnings from the Afghan evacuation being applied to rapid support of Ukrainian refugees.
One of the EP mantras has always been “make friends before you need them”. To facilitate this through our network calls, capability development events and regional activity we have continued to bring people together so that local infrastructure organisations, voluntary sector emergency responders, third sector specialists and statutory bodies can get to know more about each other and understand their roles, responsibilities and capabilities during a crisis — and most importantly how they can link in with each other.
A comment from Chris Hobbs, Emergency Planning and Resilience Lead at Tandridge District Council, in our recent virtual exercise on Winter Preparedness reflected this perfectly. He said that when we have to pick up the phone because we need help, because we need collaboration, because an emergency has hit our community; be it in our neighbourhood, our region or even our nation, it would be good to be able to say, “How are you?”, not “Who are you?”.
As we look towards a new year maybe there is a little bit more, we can each be doing as families, neighbours, communities, regions and even a nation to make sure we are ready to ask, “How are you?” When we need to pick up that phone or knock on that door.
