Recently, the SYNERGIES project organised its inaugural Advisory Board (AB) meeting, marking a great moment in its journey towards enhancing disaster resilience through innovative strategies. Led by project coordinator Alessia Golfetti (from DBL) and the AB group coordinator Sonia Matera (from DBL), the meeting delved into key project objectives, engaging discussions on empowerment, innovative communication, and managing spontaneous volunteers.
We began with an overview of the project’s objectives and expected outcomes, briefly discussing key challenges and our plans for addressing them in the coming months. After this introduction, we moved on to the main part of the meeting: gathering insights from various experts, including policymakers, citizen representatives, regional authorities, first responders, educators, healthcare practitioners, first aid trainers, NGOs, and lecturers.
Interactive Session
The core of the meeting focused on gathering opinions and feedback from AB members on three work streams of the project: Empowerment (WP2), Innovative Communication (WP3), and Spontaneous Volunteers (WP4). Moderated by the respective work package leaders, the discussions were productive, facilitated by engaging open Q&A sessions using aninteractive tool, called Mentimeter.
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WP2 – Empowerment of Disaster Management Actors
To build preparedness it is important to engage community members, including people with different capacities, and to understand and address their needs as well as sources of vulnerability. However, it can be difficult to engage and activate members of the community by authorities, first responders, and social workers. The objective of this stream of work is to learn what engagement and empowerment strategies work in specific contexts. To do so, it will develop an atlas and a preparedness assessment tool.
We asked various questions, including “Which areas of empowerment would need more development in your area?”. You can find the answers in the image below.
Enhancing community members’ understanding of risks and ways to respond, as well as engaging them in preparedness planning, emerged as crucial points.
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WP3 – Innovative Channels and Communication
This stream of work focuses on the identification of advanced technologies and unconventional methods to effectively disseminate information, enhance coordination, and strengthen communities before, during and after a disaster. The Knowledge Base for Innovative Communication focuses on five topics:
- Early Warning Systems
- Social Media
- Influencers
- Crowdsourcing Initiatives
- Mis- and Disinformation.
The content is structured into technologies, guidelines and practice examples. The Knowledge Base will be web-based and open access, it will be based on the LINKS Community Center (links.communitycenter.eu) and it will include existing solutions on the topics, with a technical interface for accessing it and contributing to it.
We posed two key questions during this part, and we’d like to highlight them in this report:
- How interested are you in the following topics (independent from your level of expertise)?” The results of this question can be seen in the image below.
- “Considering an open knowledge base about innovative communication: what would be your expectations?”
The responses emphasised the importance of building a strategy and usable tools, accessing the platform in different languages including sign language, and collecting reliable data after disasters. Participants highlighted the need for interactive tools and the consolidation of datasets, making them clear and accessible to laypersons while also containing technical references.
There was a strong emphasis on smoothly integrating information in different languages, offering key messages for communities tailored to specific scenarios or disasters, and providing comprehensive templates, guidelines, and communication tools. Additionally, the use of Augmented Reality (AR) and other interactive tools, locating and providing real-time data, creating a database of community groups, were highlighted as significant expectations.
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WP4 – Managing Spontaneous Volunteers
We refer to spontaneous volunteers as individuals or groups of people who seek or are invited to contribute with their assistance during and/or after an event. They are unaffiliated with any part of the existing official emergency management response and recovery system and may or may not have relevant training, skills, or experience (AIDR, 2018). This stream of work aims at developing a support system for legal and operational frameworks, and a table-top game to train actors and facilitate the use of the support system.
Questions:
- How would you qualify your knowledge of the topic of Spontaneous Volunteers?
- What would be the most useful outcomes to support better management of spontaneous helpers?
Final remarks
Our first meeting with the Advisory Board members was highly productive and insightful. The diverse expertise and perspectives brought by the members enriched our discussions and strategic planning. Moving forward, we are excited to implement the feedback received and continue fostering strong collaboration with our Advisory Board.
