Roscommon Community Resilience Toolkit

The Community Resilience Toolkit is a resource designed to help community groups to prepare for emergency situations. The Toolkit was developed by Roscommon County Council, through Healthy Ireland Local Government and in collaboration with the Roscommon Public Participation Network. The initiative enables community groups to prepare for, respond to, and recover from events such as flooding or severe weather incidents. This resource is a vital mechanism to identify and address local issues which may not be as visible to state or local authorities.
The initiative was created in response to learnings from previous instances of flooding and severe weather events from across County Roscommon. The development of the Toolkit was informed by local experience, national policy, and international research and collaboration. These learnings found that aside from infrastructural challenges, these events caused significant psychosocial impacts including stress, disruption and long-term financial effects of recovery among local communities.

The Community Resilience Toolkit offers a community led approach in responding to emergency situations. It utilises the integration of wellbeing and recovery into preparedness planning. It is designed to support communities during and after emergency events by using trauma-informed principles and Psychological First Aid. This reflects a shift from traditional response-focused models towards a more holistic, recovery-oriented approach, ensuring that communities are supported not only during emergencies, but throughout the recovery process also.

The Toolkit’s function involves establishing Community Emergency Response Teams (CERTS's) who oversee response to crises in their localities. It provides guidance for Response Teams to understand local demographics, geography, infrastructure and previous emergency incidents. The resource also provides steps on how to strengthen local emergency planning and guidelines for flooding, extreme weather and critical incidents.

As well as providing the toolkit document this initiative provides education to Community Emergency Response Team volunteers to administer support and care for residents after emergency events, through trauma-sensitive messaging. These CERT's are co- located within our Community Support Centre's situated in key locations across the county to support communities in the event of a crisis, extreme weather or unforeseen event. This training is focus on enabling crisis communication, crisis decision making and scenario based training ensuring the health and safety needs of volunteers and vulnerable community members is prioritised. 

Roscommon County Council, aligned with Healthy Ireland and the WHO Healthy Cities Phase VIII agenda, is committed to sharing the skills and knowledge provided by this resource with other local authorities, community and voluntary organisations in conjunction with the establishment of Community Support Centres around the country.

For further information on the Community Resilience Toolkit contact healthyroscommon@roscommoncoco.ie RPPN-Community-Resilience-Toolkit-V-2.0.pdf (size 16.7 MB)