VCS Emergencies Partnership blog: Riots to Resilience – turning the lessons from last year’s riots into action

In the wake of the August 2024 racist and Islamophobic riots, the task of re-building levels of trust, safety and resilience in our communities is critical. As local government leaders, you have an important role to play, but you are far from alone.

The riots were destructive, traumatising, and left lasting scars. But in many places, they brought communities together in response and in recovery. We wanted to create something our partners, whether from voluntary, community or faith sector organisations, councils, local infrastructure organisations or government, could learn from and use to turn lessons into action, and action into better systems.

We commissioned Neighbourly Lab, an innovation organisation committed to promoting supportive, inclusive communities, to do a listening exercise with 80 of our partners, including people working for councils, to document their experiences of the riots.

Our new report “Riots to Resilience: Five Ways to Turn Lessons into Action”, tells those stories, and includes five resilience-building recommendations, co-produced by those involved.

Below I’ve summarised these in a way I hope brings them to life for those working for and leading councils:

1. Know your communities – Councils are powerful enablers in communities – facilitating connections between organisations of different size, sector and area of focus. If you’re a council leader, regularly reaching out to community groups gives you a clear line of sight to what matters most. Build engagement with different communities into your emergency planning processes and nurture relationships through regular light-touch updates and listening spaces. Ask yourself: How diverse are our council’s various voluntary and community sector panels? Are there groups we could add who represent and understand minoritised communities and have strong bonds of trust with them?

2. Know your leaders – Councils can advocate, often through Local Resilience Forums, for community groups to learn more about who leads different parts of an emergency response and to challenge and support the process of deciding what emergency protocols cover. In the case of riots and community tensions, community groups want to know what plans are in place for de-escalation and community reassurance, and how they can help. Ask yourself: How well-integrated are relationships between leaders in the statutory sector and voluntary, community and faith sector in our area?

3. Know your places – Work with your Local Resilience Forum and your community to create a map of safe spaces for vulnerable residents impacted by emergencies and include them in emergency plans. And, if different, also consider places people can gather to show solidarity, and for volunteers to coordinate their efforts and support others. Ask yourself: How can these spaces be used in the recovery stages, too, as venues for post-traumatic support and inter-community conversations and activities bringing people together across lines of difference? What support and safeguards might we need to put in place to make sure they always feel safe?

4. Know your sources of information – Connecting smaller community groups to wider community networks is vital for tension monitoring and early warnings, and mitigating the spread of mis and dis-information. Make time (and act fast) to use your own channels (bulletins, social media accounts and websites) to sign-post people to trusted information. Consider the role of community and informal leaders in helping translate official updates into language their audience will understand and trust. Ask yourself: Was there information we struggled to communicate during the riots and, if so, was it about the method, or the messenger?

5. Know your history – Documenting and regularly drawing on the lived experiences of people affected by (and even involved in) previous riots and emergencies can increase community preparedness and make emergency plans more effective. For example, outreach with young people could include powerful stories of people who were arrested, charged and sentenced for rioting in the past. Informal community leaders with existing relationships of trust are very influential in communicating about this. Ask yourself: How do we gather the stories of people with experience of previous emergencies? How can we integrate those stories into all stages of our emergency preparation, response and recovery approach?

What next? Read the full report here.

Get in touch via info@vcsep.org.uk to tell us what resonates, what you’re doing already, and how we can work together to bring some of these strategies to life in your area?

Jon Vangorph

Head of partnerships at the Voluntary and Community Sector Emergencies Partnership