3. Mapping

Response, Recovery, Renewal

If civil society is going to “build back better”, first it needs to build its own resilience. There is going to be no shortage of surprises in the near future, and the role of communities and the charity sector will be vital to navigating the next stages of the Covid crisis and beyond. It makes no sense to do that while running on empty.

But how to do this when resources are limited?

Using the “respond, recover, renew” framework, we have mapped the present and near future. At the time of writing (August 2020), civil society is still responding to the crisis. 

The “Respond, Recover, Renew” model showing activity and velocity mapped against time.

The phases here map specifically to the needs of community groups and civil society organisations.

Response

At the time of writing, it’s impossible to predict how long the current “response” phase will continue. Of course, community and formal delivery organisations are always delivering, but the velocity of response in the early stages of the pandemic was significant; from our research, it seems unlikely that many organisations will be able to maintain that intensity of response with the resources at their disposal.

Recovery

This isn’t a traditional transformation process in which change begets a new set of processes that become part of business as usual. It’s not clear what “usual” is yet, and many people we spoke to during this project highlighted the risk of personal or organisational burn out. Recovery is necessary to guard against that.

Renewal

Renewal won’t be a crash-bang-wallop explosion of difference; it will emerge as communities and organisations juggle competing priorities.