About

Cleveland is a small area geographically, but remarkably diverse in terms of its landscape, with both rural and urban areas and beaches, industrial areas, and in terms of the communities that reside here. Building Resilience in Cleveland is a vital support to the sustainable management of community-impacting climate challenges.

BRT Cleveland, from an emergency planning perspective that we cover include climate change related challenges, extreme weather, flooding, as well as Nuclear PowerStation, coastline, major accident hazard pipelines, local events programmes, moorland, urban centres, a busy port, and some regeneration projects.  

In addition to these risks, our communities also have some of the chronic stresses and challenges affecting most post-industrial communities, such as cost of living crisis, availability of real opportunities for good jobs, to be able to envision an aspirational future for the next generation and have good health and access to healthcare, equitable access to transport to get to work, and access necessary services. There is a lot of work going on to address these challenges, and as part of developing resilience to potential risks and emergencies, we have to recognise the existence of the very real challenges facing some of our most vulnerable communities.     

Growing Community Resilience

We had already engaged our communities on the topic of Community Resilience through our local community workshops and community engagement work. We wanted to use the feedback from these events to improve the local offer and also provide the community with tangible resource and to develop their capability and capacity to support each other in the event of an incident. We had knowledge that the BRT project had been running in other areas, and we wanted to pilot the project in Cleveland. As we did not have anything similar to this model and felt it could be of benefit to our communities. 

The training offer and structure of the BRT programme appeared to fulfil some of the skills gaps we had in our area, around resilience and providing the community with a forum under BRT to come together, connect and develop networks and acquire additional skills.  

The Building Resilience in London Cleveland team had experience working across different areas and understood the diverse needs of communities and were willing to adapt to work to local needs and preferences. This was crucial to us, as one-size fits all model would not work, we had already recognised all our communities have different challenges and skills and bring a variety of positive contributions to their local communities, this is what we wanted to draw upon in each of our hubs and give the ownership to the community to develop the hub according to need of their local people. 

Impact

We have achieved our project goal of piloting some BRT Hubs in the area and these have been utilised to support our communities with dealing with risks from flooding to challenges from other incidents. It has been good to hear from our Community partners at these hubs that the engagement process and presence of the hubs has helped some of our vulnerable communities to come together and work together to respond to challenges of floods. 

Most of our communities appreciate the need for this work and the role of these hubs, however future resourcing and staffing/training consistency may prove a deciding factor in sustaining the established hubs going forward.  

The appeal of our training offer to our volunteers and communities is also of interest, and this will assist communities to improve their own knowledge, confidence, competence, and skills. However, this is dependent on communicating the availability and offer – i.e. deciding who will lead on this in each of the hubs?  

Sustainable City Resilience

We want to continue to develop the model of the Community Response Hubs in consultation and with feedback from our communities. These Hubs are a resource for the community, and here to benefit the community and we want to empower our local communities with access to information, skills, resources, training, and guidance to help in the event of incidents.