Your own community resilience arrangements could help your community coordinate local volunteers and resources in response to an emergency.
Your own arrangements can help minimise damage and disruption to your community, as well as complementing the work the emergency responders do.
Getting a core team together
The first step is to speak to people in your community. It is important to do this as any arrangements you develop will require a core team of people to:
- lead your community’s chosen form of arrangements (examples given below)
- raise awareness across your wider community
- activate and co-ordinate the arrangements during emergencies
- be the point of contact for the community when liaising with Fife Council
What will your community prepare for?
What type of emergencies has your community experienced before? Have a look at Fife’s Community Risk Register for information about the risks to your community, and how these could impact your community.
What can your community do?
Consider what skills, knowledge, and resources exist locally that your community could make use of during an emergency.
How can these resources be coordinated within your community to help your community work together?
Types of community resilience arrangements
You should consider the best format for recording your community’s agreed arrangements. Whichever format you choose, the aim of community emergency resilience arrangements is to help your community prepare for, respond to, and recover from emergencies in a way that complements the work of emergency responders.
Examples of the types of formats of arrangements your community could develop:
Community Emergency Plan
- It provides a framework to support a community response to any type of emergency.
- A plan could include a list of risks to your community, community response action plan, asset list, phone tree.
- Visit the Ready Scotland website to access a guide for developing community-led emergency response arrangements - Annexes | Ready Scotland
Community-Led Place of Safety Arrangements
- A community-owned action plan outlining your arrangements for opening a local facility as a place of safety during an emergency. Have a look at the Community-Led Place of Safety Arrangements page.
List of key contacts and/or resources
Here are few examples:
- A list of key contacts including local volunteers, emergency services, Fife Council, utility companies, Met Office, SEPA etc. To take it a step further you could make a phone tree. This would outline the lines of communication for alerting people within your community that are part of your pre-arranged response arrangements.
- A list of key contacts and information sources such as Met Office, Traffic Scotland, news pages, and radio stations.
- A list of key contacts and a list or map of resources within your community that could be used during an emergency.
Activating your Community Emergency Resilience Arrangements
Community emergency resilience arrangements are owned and activated by your community. On becoming aware of an incident affecting your community, your community lead will decide whether to activate your community emergency resilience arrangements. This will depend on the impacts on your community.
If your community’s arrangements are activated, your community lead should:
- Inform Fife Council’s Emergency Resilience Team of activation and advise of issue(s), support required, and any actions to be taken by your community.
- Determine the most appropriate level of community response, including activation of community resources, as required
- Continue to liaise with Emergency Resilience Team throughout the response. This team will pass on key information from your team to other responder agencies, such as the police.
If your community’s arrangements are not activated, your community leads should agree how to monitor the situation.
Guidance and Resources
- Resilience Learning Hub - free e-learning available to everyone
- The Guide to Emergency Planning for Community Groups
- Insurance guidance for Community Emergency Resilience Groups
- Health and Safety for Community Resilience Groups
- Data Protection
- Lifelines Scotland - for information about the psycho/social support available for emergency responder volunteers.
How can Fife Council help you?
We can offer your community advice and support throughout the process of developing community emergency resilience arrangements. Any arrangements your community puts in place to prepare for emergencies are owned by your community.
We will also provide a link between the community and other emergency response agencies.
For information relating to insurance cover for community emergency resilience activities led by a Community Council/sub-group, please visit our Public Liability Insurance page.