Create, Cultivate & Thrive: Are We Doing Enough?

Resilience is the ability of a community to continue to live, function, develop and thrive after a crisis. Key elements of enhancing resilience include maximizing social cohesion, collaboration, empowerment, participation and consideration of local characteristics and issues. This means dialogue within, and inputs from, the community itself. Skilled volunteers within the community are then to take the responsibility to rebuild relationships — within the community, with the external stakeholder i.e. organizations, and governments, to revive the buzz again and again, where it was left behind. These relationships form a solid foundation on which other community volunteers can create positive change, by improving their skills and abilities for better contribution. Fresh thinking is also needed more than ever because volunteers have unique attributes that make them essential and put them at the heart of the restoration process.

Like most community-based resilience volunteering, volunteering with the OpenStreetMap community is also uniquely flexible. People from all backgrounds sign up to support a wide range of initiatives, activities & organizational efforts across social, economic, health, logistics, environmental development & humanitarian crisis response by enriching open & sharable geo-data repository through the OpenStreetMap platform. We know from experience that it works as a great support in every context and adds value to every type of program, from Disaster risk reduction & response, public health, protection, wash, education, information management & logistic support, by fueling evidence-based interventions. The approach is universal and adaptable nowadays; community capacity development, operation & program management, mentoring & leadership are the key components to strengthening & sustaining activism.

It is hard-wired in all of us, as social beings, to connect with each other. Even when the pandemic isolated billions of people, it has prompted millions to volunteer in many innovative ways by more actively relying on virtual events & social media presence. History shows that in times of disruption, resilience depends on adaptability and decisiveness. Despite all the challenges, volunteering for others continued to thrive as people find new means of connecting and giving their time and skills. Neither of these concepts is entirely new, but they have come into focus in the recent past as the best ways for volunteers to continue supporting communities, both in their own countries and globally. Despite being challenged with movement restrictions & cancellations of physical community events in the recent past, the virtual trend kept triggering the soul-searching of the community groups and made sure the reduced buzz was a temporary blip linked to the pandemic.

We as a community want to act as a lever of change by playing a key role in that articulation between levels, as a connector of actors and a catalyst for synergies. But to do this, we must understand that the models and methods of working that have helped us so far might not necessarily serve us to address the future. We must strengthen our credibility, become more transparent, listen, and enter into dialogue with society & stakeholders, and review our organized practices and internal governance structures.

We need to keep questioning ourselves, “Are We Doing Enough?”