Roots for Resilience – The Resilience Institute

The Canadian Red Cross and The Resilience Institute are pleased to announce a new partnership that aims to strengthen the climate resilience of small, rural, and Indigenous communities across Canada.

Roots for Resilience is a new pan-Canadian program that will promote adaptive and risk reduction actions, while elevating diverse voices across Canada to highlight the meaning of resilience, agency and duty in the climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction space.

By engaging small, rural, and Indigenous communities across Canada, the Roots for Resilience team will work with communities at their current level of readiness to address climate change and risk reduction. The aim of the program is to empower people and communities to better understand the risks and challenges they face, with the goal to identify existing resources, knowledge, and skills that can be leveraged to address these challenges by taking informed action.

The Roots for Resilience initiative will take a flexible, community-centered approach to building resilience, including:

Engagement: actively engaging with diverse community members to set objectives, goals, and priorities for risk reduction and climate adaptation, ensuring an equitable and inclusive approach to bring diverse voices community to the forefront;
Planning: working together to better understand and identify the unique risks, strengths, and vulnerabilities that are specific to community members. Through participatory and collaborative planning, identify opportunities and actions to enhance individual and community resilience and create a plan to advance resilience to climate impacts;
Action: advance informed actions to reduce risk by co-developing and implementing community-driven action plans;
Learning Together: growing stronger together by encouraging reciprocal knowledge sharing on strengthening approaches to resilience; and
Inspiring: learning and sharing the attributes which exemplify individual and collective strength through a collection of diverse narratives and visual arts in the Stories of Resilience – Voices across Canada activities.

The program is founded on the belief that communities themselves are best placed to identify risks, strengths, vulnerabilities, and the actions they need to take to become more resilient in the face of climate change. Communities must be at the centre of their own resilience journey.