September 14, 2026
Academic publication
NGOs have a vital role to play in supporting community resilience.
For nearly twenty years, I helped to build and lead an NGO that made a long term commitment to the communities we served, and worked closely with them. We weren’t spending our time in the city and making occasional “field visits;” we were working and living alongside them. Instinctively we knew there were huge benefits to this proximity and this long term commitment. I’m excited to finally be able to share the results of research that reveals that this way of working can support communities to build resilience.
Research funded by the NIHR (National Institute for Health and Care Research) and conducted by the PARES consortium reveals important findings about how best to engage communities in response to climate and public health crises. Crucially, this research uncovered some of the key mechanisms through which the observed outcomes are achieved.
What resonated most with my own experience was the role that “embedded” NGOs can play in enabling communities to build resilience. This “embeddedness,” a long term commitment to communities combined with working in close proximity with them, helped to build trust and engagement; it enabled all parties to develop and work towards shared goals, both immediate and longer term. This focus on longer term goals, including goals related to natural resource management, was pivotal in the building of community resilience.
There are so many more valuable insights to emerge from this work, please take a look!
Huge thanks to all of my colleagues in the PARES consortium for enabling this important research to happen.
