Disaster Recovery Journal Summer 2024

What Is the Meaning of Community Resilience? By KATHERINE THOMAS A ccording to the Cambridge Dictionary (2024), a com munity is defined as “the people living in one particu lar area or people who are considered as a unit because of their common interests, social group, or nationality,” and resil ience is described as “the ability to be happy, successful, etc., again after some thing difficult or bad has happened.” RAND (2024) describes community Looking back over the last decade, numerous examples demonstrate how communities have come together and what has been built around them. Much of this progress stems from education, mutual learning, social group interac tions, and the dedication of professionals who volunteer their time to teach ways to resilience as “a measure of the sustained ability of a community to utilize available resources to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations.”

strengthen both individuals and commu nities. My background lies in emergency planning and business continuity, begin ning in 2014 as an emergency resil ience administrator. On my first day, I started supporting the West Africa Ebola response from 2014 to 2016. While I did not travel there, I was part of the Returning Healthcare Workers (RHW) and Passengers team, liaising with port officials. I worked at St. Pancras for a shift, met with the RHW to take them to the medical consultant, and served as the secretary for daily meetings. The team exemplified how we built our own community to support each other, whether by making a cup of tea, updating the passenger data for a call, or collating relevant information for the incident control center. Due to the stigma surrounding Ebola,

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