Caribbean Red Cross National Societies will continue to build capacity to ensure that they can support Caribbean communities to build resilience in order to be prepared, cope and recover from man made and natural disasters and crisis. Red Cross National Society development capacity development tools will be applied to National Societies to improve their organisational development and sustainability to ensure that they will be able to better support and engage their communities that they currently work with. National Societies will engage National Disaster Offices and other relevant stakeholders to identify and select and conduct national risk and vulnerability assessments to identify and rank communities according to their degree of vulnerability. National community vulnerability mappings will be produced and form a basis of community selection for targeted intervention. The Strategic Targeting methodology tool that has been developed as an objective methodology for selecting communities and based on their levels of vulnerability would be the main method for community selection.
Once communities are selected and mapped, countries will be encouraged to develop a National Community Resilience Action Plan that would be the foundation to ensure that community resilience actions would be applied in all targeted communities.
For the Red Cross this Caribbean Resilience Programme will be implemented through various projects supported through different funding sources. 12 English Speaking Caribbean Countries and Suriname are targeted for the operationalization of this Community Resilience Model described above. Community interventions will include, the conduct of vulnerability and capacity assessments (VCAs), Community Early Warning Systems (CEWS), training of community members in the suite of disaster management tools, development of community and family contingency plans, development of disaster management and community resilience plans all linked to the national resilience and response framework. On a national and regional level the programme will contribute to regional and national interventions for building resilience and responding to emergencies.