Towards transformative resilience: community, neighbourhood and system responses during the COVID-19 pandemic

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ABSTRACT

Issues presented by COVID-19 to community resilience are located at individual, community and system level. In this paper, we reflect on WHO Europe propositions on what makes resilient communities, and explore how communities and systems with varying capacity have responded to the pandemic by absorbing and adapting to challenges. In our research, we are seeing local responses at all three levels, which challenge current assumptions about the respective roles of citizen, local voluntary sector and state. This paper presents opportunities and challenges to translating this reactive social movement into proactive resilience-transforming change in how local systems work in the future.

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© 2021 Centre for Health Promotion Research, School of Health and Community Studies, Leeds Beckett University. Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

KEYWORDS:

• Community resilience
• COVID-19
• health promotion
• health inequalities
• public health

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. WHO Europe (2020) http://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/health-emergencies/coronavirus-covid-19/statements/statement-older-people-are-at-highest-risk-from-covid-19,-but-all-must-act-to-prevent-community-spread.

2. Broadly defined as the factors that protect health, notably in the face of adversity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Simon Rippon

The authors work together in the Centre for Health Promotion Research at Leeds Beckett University https://www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/school-of-health-and-community-studies/research/health-promotion/. The Centre has been conducting research into the social model and social determinants of health and wellbeing for more than 20 years, with research themes in health inequalities, healthy communities, community wellbeing, and systems approaches to public health. We draw on a wide range of research methodologies, from systematic reviews to community based participatory research, and our research ethos is based on ‘doing with, not to’ our research participants and collaborators, to improve people’s health and wellbeing and reduce health inequalities.