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What is Resilience?
Resilience is about being ready — as individuals, families, and communities — to cope with and recover from unexpected challenges. In our area, we’ve seen resilience in action during winter storms, power cuts, and other disruptions. People checked in on neighbours, shared resources, and found ways to stay safe and connected. But we've also seen that many wanted to help more, and simply didn’t know how.
Traditionally, resilience was seen as something handled by emergency services or councils. But recent events have shown that responders can be stretched too, and that households and communities need to be prepared to help themselves — and each other — when it matters most.
Personal and Household Resilience
This is about what you and your family can do to prepare — from keeping a basic emergency kit, to knowing how to stay warm during a power cut, to having a way to contact others in your area. These simple steps can reduce stress during an incident and help you manage until normality returns, or until help arrives.
Community Resilience
This means people coming together — sharing skills, checking in on neighbours, and making sure no one is left out in the cold (literally or figuratively). The Tullynessle and Forbes Hall plays a role here too — as a place that can support the community with warmth, power, information and connection when it's most needed - your Community Resilience Hub.
Why It Matters
Building resilience isn’t about expecting the worst — it’s about being ready for it, together. On the rest of this page, you’ll find helpful links, documents, and practical tips to help your household and our wider community stay safe, connected and prepared — whatever comes our way.
What does the hall offer?
We are now a Resilience Hub, on Aberdeenshire council's resilience asset list. We can offer:
1) Shelter & heat - we have a backup generator and solar panels, so even if the power is out, we will be able to heat the hall.
2) Somewhere to charge your essential devices in a power cut, and somewhere you can fill up a flask of boiled water for that essential cup of comforting tea.
3) Internet if the phones are down. With our Starlink satellite and backup generator, we will be able to get our WIFI up and running, so you can get in contact with friends and relatives.
4) Somewhere to come and look for assistance, we are sure our local community will step up and help out as the situation requires.
5) A hub to assist any larger scale incidents, as the Aberdeenshire Council's resilience team requires.
Personal and Household Resilience Advice
The Tullynessle & Forbes Hall Version of SSEN's Home Emergency Plan
We have added a Tullynessle & Forbes Hall angle to SSEN's good Home Emergency Plan - Follow this plan & keep it handy, and you won't go far wrong.
Other Links & Resources for - Personal and Household Resilience
SSEN has a good Home Emergency Plan that you can use, with useful contact numbers and ideas for what to keep in a home emergency kit. Ready Scotland has another one, also useful.
Ready Scotland also has an excellent page on how to Stay Informed, showing you how to sign up to alerts and where to check for updates on weather, traffic, flooding, water & emergency alerts.
Aberdeenshire Council has a useful "How to be More Resilient in 30 Simple Ways Across 30 Days" sheet that you can look at for ideas.
The Age Scotland charity has an excellent Building Resilience Advice Booklet that covers a range of topics from preparedness at home, to paperwork, finances, health and wellbeing.
Other useful resources are SSEN's Power Cut Advice Leaflet, And 3 more from Aberdeenshire Council: Their Winter Defence - Your guide to Home Safety and Storm Preparedness goes into details on preparing for winter, they have a good Winter Driving Advice guide, and you can even get kids involved using their Children's Activity Booklet "Let's Get Ready for an Emergency".
Ready Scotland has some great webpages that go into more detail on specific areas if you are interested: Their Home Emergency Kit list, their Severe Weather page with specific advice for hot weather, rain & flooding, storms & wind and cold / snow / ice. Any they have individual advice pages on how to respond to Travel Disruption, Loss of Utilities, Terrorism, Cyber Incidents and Coping with Trauma.
And finally, the Aberdeenshire Council community resilience strategy page has useful documents on telecom resilience (your phones & internet!), another good Individual Preparedness Advice Note, an Emergency Household Plan Advice Note and a good Are You Ready For Winter Advice Leaflet. We can't link to these documents but you will find them down the right hand side of This Page.
Links & Resources for - Community Resilience
Your Tullynessle & Forbes Community and Hall Association is currently drafting a Community Resilience Plan, that will set out how we will try to help the community, and utilise the hall as a Community Resilience Hub - we will share that once it is finalised!
The North of Scotland Regional Resilience Partnership share their Community Risk Register 2024, this document highlights risks that have the highest likelihood and potential to have significant impact, causing disruption to the North of Scotland region and its communities - we used this plan to help us assess the likely risks in our local area, to see where we might be able to help with the resources available to us.
Aberdeenshire Council's Community Resilience Strategy page also has a lot of useful resources that we have used in the development of our own plan, including their Supporting Vulnerable People in the Community Advice Note, and their Flooding Roles and Responsibilities note.
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