Policies

Relevant City Context

Useful for any city. If a city wishes to become resilient it needs to firstly look at its own internal structures. This includes identifying your own people as the biggest asset and ensuring that City employees are becoming as resilient as possible. Glasgow City Council is the biggest employer in the city with around 30,000 employees. This puts the city council in a perfect position to reach a large percentage of Glaswegians by raising awareness through its staff.

Goal

Promote a culture of resilience by arranging different resilience awareness raising activities such as campaigns, events or training activities for all stakeholders, and so help institutionalize the resilience action plan.

This case focuses on engaging with, and promoting, resilience to Glasgow City Council (GCC) staff. GCC is the biggest employer in the city area, the GCC therefore believed there were big opportunities for reaching staff who can therefore become more resilient themselves and also liaise with citizens in a frame of resilience thinking. Thus, the case focusses on the resilience of GCC and staff understanding the need for flexibility. It also sought to promote personal resilience for staff and to encourage them to seek support when they need it and to encourage them to take time to reflect on issues impacting their own lives.

The internal organisational development team in GCC created an online resilience training course for all Glasgow city council staff. The idea had to be formulated into an appropriate interactive staff training course.

Discussions were held over late 2015 and early 2016 to create course content. This relates to personal resilience, including self-awareness and building competences, as well as team resilience and celebrating diversity. It was essential to have the Organisational Development team on board to bring knowledge and understanding of training processes. It was also essential to have political support of development of the training course as this allowed resource allocation.

Cooperation amongst stakeholders

The organisational development team (in charge of training for staff) played a key role. It was a facilitator and a resource to pull together the training tool. They worked alongside the resilient Glasgow team and had various conversations with staff to consider what would be useful for staff to understand. The Organisational Development team within the city council initiated the project in conjunction with the resilient Glasgow team. This was championed, and facilitated and developed by the Organisational Development team.

Stakeholders involved were: Organisational Development team: facilitator / resource; Resilient Glasgow team: Support with content for the course; Staff: Role to implement action on an individual and team level; Communications: Key to sharing the message and promoting the course to staff.

Outcome

This project has allowed us to reach a larger audience of Glaswegians. This will allow us to boost the personal resilience. The course managed reach a deeper level of staff than expected and resulted in better feedback and engagement regarding the resilience strategy. One measure of the effectiveness of the outcome could be the numbers of staff who have gone through the training tool which currently relates to approximately 25% of staff. 

This course could have been rolled out to other organisations for use in their own staff training. Consequently the City is now in the process of considering this as well as an animation. 

Resources

The key resource was the organisational development team who pulled together the information and data required to produce the online training tool.

Relevant city context

The aim of this project was to inform citizens on how to increase their preparedness in case of a crisis. The project is relevant to cities who seek to increase public awareness about resilience issues.

Goal: to help be prepared and respond quickly when a shock occurs

A public event was held where different stakeholders provided information to citizens of Kristiansand municipality. The initial spark was a phone call from a citizen on the topic of flooding risks in his garage. The phone call initiated a discussion on civil societies preparedness and resulted in the Ministry of Climate and Environment giving the municipality resources to carry out the project, “how to increase the civil society preparedness level”, with the aim to communicate and educate the citizens on risks, hazards, and solutions.

It was a one-year project carried out between June 2016- June 2017. A public event was held where each involved stakeholder provided information on how to prepare for a crisis given their area of expertise. The event was organised as an open family day between 10 and 14 on a weekend, to allow as many citizens as possible to partake. Topics at the event included safety in the home (Fire Brigade), individual safety (Red Cross), Safety at sea (Rescue corps), Safe activities in water (local diving club), Resilience in building activities (City planners) and 10 rules for citizen resilience (The civil protection unit). The final stage of the project was to prepare a report and a guideline for how municipalities can help citizens be better prepared for crises.

Cooperation among stakeholders

The project involved multiple stakeholders: Municipalities in the region, Fire Brigade, Civil Defence Force and NGO’s (Norwegian Society for Sea Rescue, the Red Cross, Green City Alliance), and the municipalities city planners. The decision to have a public event was decided together with all the stakeholders during an initial start-up meeting. A main challenge was to reach a decision on how approach the citizens, that is, how to engage as many citizens as possible. In the evaluation of the event the municipality discussed that it may have been a better solution to hold a series of smaller events in each municipality, rather than one big event in the city. This would likely not have been costlier and would have allowed local festivals/events that may have reach more people.  

Outcomes

Between 300 and 400 people attended the event. The event was believed to be successful, although several points of improvement where identified during the evaluation, regarding timing and structure. It was seen as a challenge to get people to come to the event. It was discussed that people will actively seek out information and are ready to invest in preparedness if there is a realistic threat of just after a crisis has occurred. An effective time to reach a mass of citizens is thus during that short interval after a crisis. Based on the outcome of the project guidelines for how municipalities can prepare citizens for crisis were written.

Links

Guidelines for how municipalities can prepare citizens for a crisis: https://www.regjeringen.no/en/dokumenter/meld.-st.-10-20162017/id2523238/