2. Community spirit and the desire to help When disaster strikes, small acts of kindness can make a real difference to people in need. The findings from our research show that communities want to pull together when an emergency happens, and local people have a desire to get involved. Communities want to play a part Harnessing the power of communities As part of our research we surveyed 4,000 It’s clear we must do more to harness the power UK adults and asked respondents to what of local people. The public recognises this, with extent they agreed with a number of 92% of people feeling that the events statements on community cohesion during of last year in London and Manchester a crisis. The findings show the extraordinary demonstrate why more should be done strength of community spirit across the UK, to build cooperation and resilience to and the strong desire from individuals to play emergencies within local communities. a bigger role in times of crisis. We believe that crisis response should be Almost nine in ten people (88%) said if an local, with communities empowered to emergency happened in their community prepare for, respond to and recover from they would want to get involved, and emergencies. For example we are expanding of those who had actually experienced an our ability to engage with communities by emergency already, fewer than one in ten (7%) strengthening our community engagement said they did not want to help. approach. More than two thirds of people (68%) feel there is a good sense of community spirit in their area and we need to draw on this in our approach to crisis response. Key findings I would take I would need my When an emergency When an emergency pride in helping my neighbours to help me happens it’s important happens it’s important community recover if a crisis happened in to rally together as a that people know how from an emergency my community community they can help to speed up the recovery . 1 e c n e r e f Re : e c r 90% agree 67% agree 94% agree 94% agree u o S 7