Can community-building activities at the grassroots improve disaster resilience?

TANNA, Vanuatu — In March 2015, a severe tropical cyclone swept across the island chain of Vanuatu in the South Pacific.

With winds racing up to 250 kilometers per hour, Cyclone Pam took a path directly over Tanna, one of the southernmost islands in the Vanuatu archipelago.

The damage was extensive. Homes were destroyed and trees defoliated. Communication was cut off.

International aid agencies, which responded quickly with emergency flights of food and medicine, described the conditions as among the most challenging they had ever faced, according to news reports at the time.

Although the island has not yet fully recovered, much has been done to rebuild. One factor that may have helped the people of Tanna was a strong sense of togetherness — a cohesion that had been built up in part by extensive community-building activities undertaken there by the local Bahá’í community in recent years.

In the community of Isangel, local Bahá’ís worked with outside relief organizations to help identify the neediest and effectively distribute relief supplies. In this, they used capacities acquired in their own community building efforts — such as collecting statistics, consulting together, and acting systematically — to assist the aid agencies and others to better understand local needs and conditions.

“We used the tools and instruments I had learned about while serving as a coordinator (of Bahá’í activities),” said one resident of Tanna. “Many aid organizations approach us when they encounter an obstacle. We suggest to them to work with the chiefs and consult with the people at the grassroots.”

In Tumah Mine, a group of young people helped the elders rebuild their houses immediately after the storm. Their efforts were partly inspired by training they have received in a youth empowerment program offered by the Bahá’í community, which emphasizes selfless service to others.

And in Namasmetene, a local resident told visitors shortly after the cyclone that their local Bahá’í governing body would soon meet to discuss how to assist in the reconstruction process for the entire community.

“We know that we should not depend on aid donors, but that we should take charge of our own development,” they said. “For the reconstruction process, we will use the same tools and instruments that we used for the [advancement] of our community.”

The experiences in Tanna offer a glimpse of the potential that empowered local individuals can play in disaster relief efforts — reflecting the kinds of contributions that can be made when people at the grassroots level are involved from the beginning in humanitarian aid efforts.

“Natural disasters have been conceptualized in various ways throughout history, from acts of God to the combined result of natural phenomena and human-use systems,” said Stephen Karnik, who coordinates humanitarian response for the Bahá’í International Community (BIC).

“Today, they are understood primarily as social constructions, reflecting the reality that while natural calamities can strike anywhere, the brunt of their damage is invariably absorbed by certain populations, such as the materially poor, the sick, the elderly, women, and children.

“This view of natural disaster as a social construction shifts attention from the natural world to the human one. No longer are responders addressing the tsunami or the earthquake. Rather, they are addressing the social effects created by the tsunami or the earthquake — the breakdowns in social interaction, community leadership, communication, and systems of support.

“While most Bahá’í communities have little experience with disaster events, they have extensive experience with the processes of building, strengthening, and transforming social systems. They have strengthened this capacity through years of effort in neighborhoods and villages. This orientation allows them to reach out to recovering communities from a position of strength and confidence, rather than one of doubt and insecurity,” said Mr. Karnik.

World Humanitarian Summit

The BIC brought forward some of these ideas in its contributions to the World Humanitarian Summit, held in Istanbul, Turkey, 23-24 May 2016.

Convened by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the Summit sought to bring together leaders from governments, businesses, aid agencies, and civil society in an effort to improve and better coordinate the delivery of aid in a world where an estimated 130 million people need humanitarian assistance simply in order to survive.

Faith-based organizations are seen by many as having a unique comparative advantage in humanitarian contexts. As noted in the “Charter for Faith-based Humanitarian Action,” which was produced in conjunction with the Summit, religious groups often “have an established relationship of trust and familiarity with local communities in which they are embedded…before a crisis” and “are often the first responders and key providers of assistance and protection during crises.”

The BIC issued a statement to the Summit titled “Rising Together: Building the Capacity to Recover from Within.” It takes note of the importance of such qualities in responding to humanitarian crises.

“An area’s ability to respond therefore has much to do with the capacities, attitudes, and qualities of community that characterized it long before the rivers rose or the cyclone made landfall,” said the statement.

“Communities that have been especially effective in responding have — prior to the disaster — been consciously working to create distinctive and beneficial patterns of collective life. Building consensus and unity of vision over time, they make intentional and purposeful choices about the kinds of interaction found in the community, about how people relate to one another in various spaces, and about the kinds of relationships found between community members, between different groups or sub-populations, and between institutions of governance,” it said.

Any new international, coordinated effort to address the rising tide of humanitarian disasters should consider how best to promote the development of such capacities, the statement said.

“Some will pertain primarily to intellectual, technical, and scientific pursuits. Others will be more social in nature, focused on strengthening and refining patterns of interaction, association, and relationship among inhabitants. Still others will focus on the moral and normative aspects of collective life, drawing on the religious heritage of humankind to address foundational issues of meaning, higher motivation, and moral purpose.”

The full statement can be found at www.bic.org