Blue Sky Session: July (Adelaide)

Q:  How can we build and measure community resilience through social innovation?

Speaker: Alastair McAslan (Torrens Resilience Institute)

The concept of resilience is attractive as it suggests the ability of something or someone to cope in the face of adversity - to recover and return to normality after confronting an abnormal, alarming, and often unexpected threat. Resilience embraces the concepts of awareness, detection, communication, reaction (and if possible avoidance) and recovery. These are essential features of the daily struggle for life and are founded in our basic instinct of survival. Resilience also suggests an ability and willingness to adapt over time to a changing and potentially threatening environment.

There is a management maxim which suggests that “.... if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” This is particularly true for community resilience. No matter how much is written on the principles or on the steps to be taken to improve the resilience of communities within neighbourhoods, there is a need to measure current levels of resilience and to establish measurable objectives and targets for improved resilience.

About the Blue Sky Sessions

The Blue Sky Sessions provide a forum for people to come together in a spirit of collaborative inquiry to discuss some of the pressing challenges of our day and how we might go about tackling them.

The format is informal and interactive. Speakers provide some introductory remarks around a given question before some Q&A, followed by general discussion and networking. This will not be a case of talking heads. We encourage people to participate, to be creative and to think big.