... resilience is only partly about infrastructure, agency funding and the like: it’s also about community cohesion.

Andy Revkin, The New York Times, 21 July 2016

Local community diagramRecovering from disruption or adversity – ‘bouncing back’ to business as usual – is no longer sufficient for today’s needs.

The question businesses are now asking is how they bounce forward to a new status of increased competitiveness and improved sustainability in the longer term.

Resilience initiatives have tended to focus on emergencies and immediate shocks, rather than longer-term or chronic issues. The emphasis has been on strategic plans and protocols in a top-down approach. 

Emphasis has also been placed on responses to single events, over readiness and regeneration from repeated disruptions.

Resilience First is taking a different, but supportive approach.

It aims to enable and equip local business communities so they can respond positively to recurring and unexpected challenges – a bottom-up approach that creates a solid base of local resilience for national strategies to build on.

Working together, we will create a wholly new approach to business community resilience which draws on the collective experience of our network and can be easily applied by a micro business or a metro Mayor. 

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