Within arms’ reach but at arms’ length – mutual aid, community resilience and agile response during COVID19

Keywords: Community resilience; resourcefulness; mutual aid; volunteering
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 61

Abstract

The COVID19 pandemic has seen blossoming of emergent community groups organizing under the banner of mutual aid, enacting diverse community support functions. This neighbour-to-neighbour support exemplifies ‘community resilience’ envisioned by international agencies including NATO and the UN, as well as national and local governments. Citizens and communities are called on to be ‘resilient’ – where ‘resilience’ is defined as a process that builds preparedness prior to a disaster and allows for a healthy recovery afterwards (Arbons, 2014). ‘Resilience’ is, however, a contested term. Academics point instead to the need for community ‘resourcefulness’ (MacKinnon and Derickson, 2013), foregrounding organizing capacity, spare time, social capital and skill sets and also the capability to reach into public- and third-sector resources.

The day-to-day enactment of social capital during emergencies often operates through links maintained across school, work and recreational activities (Stephens, 2007) including clubs, service groups, sports teams, churches and libraries (Arbon, 2014). An important community resource during COVID19 has been agile and pro-active individuals with existing connections to institutions, who were able to reach into those institutions' resources while keeping bureaucracy at arm’s length. This enabled, for example, the rapid identification of vulnerable families within school communities and the rapid mobilisation of support to marginalised addicts and street sleepers ‘on the radar’ of faith and charity networks. This agile model of individual actors with institutional reach has not yet been widely explored in the community resilience/resourcefulness literature, but offers a fresh lens through which community preparedness might be approached in future.