Social capital expert Daniel Aldrich visiting Australia

At Resilient Ready our core focus is to build business community resilience. A key part of this includes building social capital and community connections.

We have been beyond lucky to have Professor Daniel Aldrich as part of our volunteer advisory group for the past two years. In addition, Daniel has been an active member on many of our projects to integrate his global experience on community resilience into our disaster impacted business communities.

Next month (March 2023) Daniel will return to Australia. His visit is sponsored by the Fulbright US Scholar Program, the flagship foreign exchange scholarship program of the United States of America, aimed at increasing bi-national research collaboration, cultural understanding, and the exchange of ideas.

Part of his visit includes connecting Daniel with the business communities Resilient Ready has been co-designing Blue Mountain Business Resilience and Kangaroo Island Business Climate Roadmap projects with. This is a major opportunity for multi-stakeholders across these two disaster-impacted regions to hear first-hand from Daniel.

His visit will include data discovered from the 2022 whitepaper Daniel co-authored – Getting Connected: Using Networks to Build Business Community Resilience in the Blue Mountains as part of our Blue Mountains Business Community Resilience Project with BusinessBM.

The Paper used the results of a Blue Mountains Business Community Resilience Survey conducted by us in late 2021, and a review of recent literature, concluding that networking is the key to building the capacity of businesses to withstand ongoing and future crisis events, and grow business resilience.

Daniel’s visit is linked to his appointment as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Applied Public Policy (Democratic Resilience), part of the Torrens Resilience Initiative, based at Flinders University in Adelaide. The Torrens Resilience Initiative is dedicated to building societal resilience to counter the effect of acute disruptions such as disasters, conflict, and humanitarian crisis.

This is a great opportunity for Daniel, and a wonderful one for Resilient Ready – while we have been collaborating with Daniel via online conversations over the past couple of years, there is nothing better than building social capital in person!

We will be sharing more about Daniel’s visit soon.

Resilient Ready is a social enterprise delivering innovative solutions to enable every organisation to thrive before, during and after disasters. To keep updated on news and current projects, sign up to our newsletter.