How to develop a coherent community engagement approach as part of community-led resilience and emergency planning:

Executive Summary

The Innovate UK Net Zero Living programme aims to help local and regional authorities accelerate the transition to net zero. The cohort of 52 funded places across the UK delivered projects to overcome the non-technological barriers to delivering net zero in a place.

Involve, Forum for the Future, Ipsos and Quantum Strategy & Technology were appointed to support 28 local authorities with their work on various climate-related projects.

As climate-related emergencies increase, Northern Ireland is exploring how communities and public bodies can respond together more effectively. In 2025, a new team, the Building Resilience In Communities team (BRIC), was created and jointly funded by the Department for Communities and the Department for Infrastructure. Its goal is to develop greater coordination across Northern Ireland in line with the UK Government’s National Resilience Strategy. 

A key aspect of BRIC’s work is incorporating an understanding of community resilience, one that includes the quality of relationships between citizens and decision makers and a clarity on where and how decisions are made. 

Over a four month period, Involve partnered with the BRIC team to deliver reflective capacity building, enabling the BRIC team to strengthen their confidence, clarify their purpose, and embed principles of high-quality public engagement in emergency planning.

This work resulted in a need for a shared understanding of the principles of quality community and public engagement, and the need to consistently communicate to both communities and to other parts of the Northern Ireland emergency planning system. 

The BRIC team approach is informed by:

• Community-led resilience requires strong relationships between citizens and duty-bearers.
• Small teams enabling change within complex systems need reflective support to survive and thrive.
• Beginning with curiosity rather than help is the foundation for effective community engagement.

This case study sets out the approach, insights and lessons for policymakers considering similar work.

Objectives

The aims of the project were:

• To surface and build shared understanding of existing community and public engagement knowledge and experiences already existing within a new team. 
• To introduce a range of engagement and facilitation methodologies that the team could use in their work across different communities, and create the space for reflective practice conversations. 
• To support the development of clear aims, objectives and monitoring and evaluation systems for the team’s work. 
• To support connections between the new team and other actors and programmes of work in the wider emergency preparedness system. 

Approach and Methodology

Engagement Methods

The work focused on capacity building and strategic reflection, rather than delivering a single community engagement event. Over five facilitated sessions, Involve supported the BRIC team to explore what community-led emergency planning means in practice, and what gets in the way. Involve’s capacity building approach was grounded in:

• Asset-based community development, starting with strengths rather than deficits
• A political understanding of community engagement that is grounded in debate, value-based choices or democratic representation rather than a technocratic one that is expert-driven and often top-down in approach. By recognising the impact of tensions between the demands of the state and sponsor departments and those of communities and civil society on the BRIC team
• Reflections on how the wider emergency preparedness response and recovery landscape can enable or block democratic participation 

The main framework used was the Public Engagement Wheel, with deep dives into different stages using tools such as ORID, Heart/Body/Mind Sets, Stories Mapping, Deep Democracy, Creative Approaches, including Poetry, Reflective Praxis. 

Crucially, the team moved between being participants and facilitators – experiencing methods first hand and reflecting on how they might use them in their own work.

Inclusive Practices

Inclusivity began with the team itself. Early sessions revealed needs that had not initially been visible, for instance, different learning styles, need for physical movement and auditory needs. By practising this internally, the team was better prepared to bring the same care and curiosity into community spaces.

Innovations

The team used creative methods, including writing poetry, to process community engagement events: what happened, what they felt and what they were learning. This slowed the work down, made the invisible visible, and helped the team name the quality of engagement they were striving for. 

Key Outcomes

Policy Impact

• The team developed a shared understanding of the principles of quality community and public engagement. These principles provide a shared thread that they can communicate consistently, both to communities and to other parts of the emergency planning system.

Social Impact

• Understanding that community engagement is as much about walking alongside communities as it is about challenging and building capacity with duty bearers
• The importance of those delivering services from outside a community beginning from a point of ‘curiosity’ and learning rather than ‘help’.

Internal impact

• The team is clear on public engagement processes as part of growing a community-led approach to emergency planning
• The team gained confidence, pushing back in strategic conversations with senior figures, challenging ideas that resilience can be achieved without community involvement

Challenges & Lessons Learned

Challenges

• The tight time pressure and expectations are placed on this little team within an 18-month to 24-month timeframe. 
• Conflicting and multiple definitions of community resilience, initiatives and projects. 
• Negotiating the tension between the sponsor departments’ demands and citizens’ realities and voices. 
• Emergencies are about people and communities and right now, people are exhausted and disconnected. Trust in governmental response has been lost

Solutions

• Investing in building up the strength, coherence and ‘backbone’ of the team to allow them to respond intuitively and openly to creating opportunities for citizens and duty bearers to establish effective working relationships in preparing, responding and recovering from emergencies.  
• Make visible resources, skills and wisdom at a local level without shifting the risk from government to communities.

Lessons Learned

• A community cannot know what is needed from external actors, such as this new team, until they discover what they already have and the value of this. Once a community understands what it has within, and in turn what it requires from outside, they begin to occupy a more powerful space.

Communicating for impact

Involve’s support of BRIC culminated in the team’s formal introduction to the wider emergency preparedness system in January 2026, where the team can position their engagement principles within the system from the outset.

Additional Resources & References

Regional Community Resilience Group

Contact Information

Ciara O’Hanlon, Resilience Manager,

Local Government Civil Contingencies,

Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon Borough Council,

Craigavon Civic Centre and Conference Centre,

Lakeview Road,

Craigavon,

Co.Armagh

BT64 1AL