“I want to express how appreciative I am of finding a website like yours!…Your Resilience Project is like another piece of the puzzle falling into place for me… It takes great courage and altruism to put progressive ideas out there for everyone to discuss. So thank you for evaluating your life lessons and experience and using it to help people at this time!” Natalie
THE LOCAL RESILIENCE PROJECT is designed to help households build greater resilience as they anticipate and navigate disruptions posed by accelerating climate change and ecological collapse. To this end, the website offers three practical, integrated tools :
The Conversation: articles to ‘kick start’ discussions with family, friends, co-workers and politicians about how we got here, why its taken so long for us to acknowledge the extent of our predicament and what we might do to triage our lives from ‘worst case scenarios’, several of which are already built irrevocably into Earth’s systems.
The Checklist: a 100 question survey of the current level of a household’s resilience across 12 areas of life. Completion of all 100 questions generates a score that households can then use as a catalyst for improving their resilience it via The Call To Action.
The Call To Action: 10 sequential actions to strengthen personal and community resilience, ranging from increasing your ‘Yes’ Checklist results to networking with resilient cities across the globe.
THE LRP CREATOR is Lesley Gillett, an Australian fed up with 30 years of media misinformation, misplaced faith in technology and the collective ecological illiteracy and denial around the damage being done to our planet by fossil fuel addiction.
With a background in teaching Geography, Economics and Social Sciences, Lesley has been aware for a long time of the inherent limitations of an economic model based on infinite economic growth. Her studies in Conflict Resolution, also taught her that since most people will avoid rather than embrace conflict. Few would speak the kind of ‘truth to power’ necessary to convince political and corporate interests to end the damage being done to Earth’s systems. Everywhere she looked, Lesley saw people locked into lifestyles increasingly threatened by those very lifestyles! Evidence has accumulated for decades that we’re creating our own existential crisis but still we look away.
So, when Lesley had a dream in which a future grandchild asked her: “What did you do during The Great Disruption grandma?”, she knew exactly what she had to do.
Her time as a teacher taught Lesley that when she treated her students as capable of achieving their goals, they generally did so. She also believes the human family can achieve astonishing positive outcomes in the face of climate change and ecological destruction. We just need the right kind of information, the right incentives and enough encouragement to do so.
The foundational belief behind The Local Resilience Project is that if people can obtain the right kind of information and incentives by looking closely at how their lifestyles have become unsustainable and are responsible for the accelerating climate change and ecological collapse that threatens them, then they might also be inspired to think and behave differently. If not for themselves, then for their children and grandchildren.
With this in mind, Lesley updated a 100 question Self Assessment Form (the original designed by American economic researcher Chris Martenson), renamed it The Checklist and created the Local Resilience Project.
Lesley’s goal is to share The Local Resilience Project freely with communities around Australia (and the world) in order to achieve a critical mass of people utilising it. Once this is achieved, the planet wide awakening already triggered by movements such as Extinction Rebellion and Schools For Climate Change will grow exponentially as people reclaim agency in their lives and demonstrate renewed responsibility for their stewardship of the Earth.
How will you respond when someone in your future asks you: “When did you know and what did you do?”
THE LRP VISION: An Australia (and a world) in which every household operates sustainably and resiliently as they navigate the challenging transition through disruptive climate change and ecological collapse.
THE LRP MISSION is to share information and resources that will support households to have conversations, hold meetings and take action in their daily lives to reduce the negative impact their lifestyles are having on the planet and to ameliorate the impact that the disruptions already built into Earths systems will have on their future lives.