Best wishes, reflections and hopefulness for 2022 from the team 🌱

by Jan 31, 2022News

Dear Friends,

Happy New year, we hope this finds you in good health. It is a pleasure to share our news, including a Resilience Brokers recap summary of 2021, we welcome a new member to our team, and the launch of our Yucatan project.

The Resilience Brokers team are excited about working collaboratively towards fairer, healthier, more climate-resilient places & livelihoods, and we love co-developing new opportunities with our friends and colleagues.

If you have comments, questions, suggestions or would like to collaborate with Resilience Brokers, get in touch with us.

A new year 🌱

We find winter is always a time of year for retreat, rest, reflection and then looking forward to cultivating green shoots for the coming year. Like most, we have adapted to the global pandemic. The team, and prospective new colleagues, have all commented how important the human, health and wellbeing focus of our working culture is to them. We became accredited as a 4-day working week employer and are originally remote-by-design so have a lot of experience in how to collaborate digitally with care.

We’ve loved sharing our stories and insights on systems thinking applied with community and city scales. Our Exeter Living Lab continues to flourish and we have some exciting releases coming in the next few months on “data for sustainable place-based investments” and “future imagining of city-region economies to 2050”. We’re also currently exploring with our partners the greater interest in a 15-minute city with more active, healthy mobility options and also how data and models can support Net Zero decision making for places and master plans in more appropriate time scales. Currently much building and area modelling is static and requires many months to update to support planning processes.

As ever, please do reach out to Resilience Brokers to connect and open up exciting conversations. We’re always happy exploring ideas and new initiatives and are keen to share our learnings and expertise.

Introducing Anne Giles, our new Senior Programme Manager 👋🏼

We are pleased to welcome Anne Giles as our Senior Programme Manager, where Anne will manage Resilience Brokers’ growing portfolio of international projects. She previously spent four years managing international initiatives in the Cultural Affairs section of the US Embassy in London and worked at Chatham House, where she helped establish the Queen Elizabeth II Academy for Leadership in International Affairs.

Anne enjoys collaborating on projects across borders and cultures and has spent time studying or working in Costa Rica, Spain, China, the Netherlands, the United States, and the United Kingdom, where she is currently based. She holds a Master’s in International Relations from the University of Amsterdam and a Bachelor’s in International Business from Appalachian State University.

Pathway for a Sustainable Covid-19 Recovery in Yucatán, México 🇲🇽

We are delighted to announce a new project in collaboration with GIZ MĂ©xico, the Yucatán state government, and the Committee on Data (CODATA) of the International Science Council. The project will identify how Yucatán state can use enhanced data and modelling infrastructure skills to link economic, environmental and social development in a sustainable recovery from Covid-19. These efforts will build towards the state government’s wider Agenda 2040 initiative, a participatory plan of action to include the voices of residents from across the Yucatán in capturing their needs and deciding how best to meet challenges – not just in the short-term, but in building a prosperous, inclusive and sustainable future.

The work will cover three key themes:

  • Data and digital infrastructure;
  • Integrated systems models and tools; and
  • Specific recommendations for sustainable development and Covid-19 recovery.

As a result, the project will co-create a strategy and action plan to introduce integrated systems and utilise new data and modelling approaches in the Yucatán that support effective green growth planning and decision-making. The project will also build skills by training key local stakeholders in these new systems and approaches to ensure sustainability and value into the future.

We look forward to sharing further updates as the project progresses throughout the year.

Developing a transformative theory of change – Handbook đź“–

As part of our work on the EIT ClimateKIC ACTonNBS network of cities accelerating the use of Nature-Based Solutions we supported the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium in the development of a new methodology to support systems transformation. The TIPC and EIT ClimateKIC have now turned this work into the Motion Handbook that we highly recommend.

Public and private innovation organisations strive to contribute to tackling global challenges such as climate change and growing inequality. System change that drives a sustainability transformation has become a shared goal and innovation policy and actions play a key role in this process. However, transformations are long-term processes that require interventions at various levels and in multiple locations. Hence, organisations working towards these transformations are in the need of frameworks and tools that can help them understand and assess the contribution that each initiative has in the transformation of a system.

This handbook does this. It contributes to accelerating a transition towards sustainability by providing a guide for the development of a Transformative Theory of Change, a methodology that helps projects, programmes and organisations to design, implement and evaluate interventions that contribute to systems transformation. It introduces Transformative Outcomes as levering points for transformation and the approach is designed to maximise learning among participants of an initiative.

Work we love ❤️

…and recommend you check out!

For all enquiries get in touch with us