New project launched: REBOUND – ‘Fostering Resilience in Rural Communities’

The implementation of this project, under the Erasmus+ programme, kicked off on 1 February 2022. The two-year project is led by the Technological University of the Shannon (formerly Limerick Institute of Technology, Ireland) working with five partner organisations, including LDnet.

REBOUND seeks to respond to macro- and micro-level imperatives and impetuses towards the promotion of resilience, to identify and capture innovative practices in respect of resilience and to disseminate and promote conducive knowledge capital.

The project’s primary aim is:

• To devise a practitioner-oriented, workable, robust, reliable and solution-focused capacity building training programme that captures the merits of resilient communities and enables stakeholders, in a vocational learning environment, to assess, promote, review, tweak and evaluate approaches to resilience promotion across a range of rural area types in Europe.

The associated objectives are:

• To collate best practice experiences and models (drawing on our pre-development work and networks) in respect of place-based resilience-building;
• To devise a resilience measuring, signposting and strategic planning tool that practitioners can utilise in a diverse range of geographical settings;
• To engage with practitioners (in vocational education, rural development and civil society settings, among others) in collaboratively co-designing an innovative training and capacity-building training programme that effectively enables them to promote resilience in tandem with place-making;
• To refine a digital assessment and learning repository with a series of dimensions and indicators to measure rural community resilience/vibrancy, including citizens’ perceptions and experiences thereof – that can be transferred to diverse contexts and tweaked in line with territorial features and potential; and
• To engage with multiple actors in transferring project learnings into practices in planning, land-use, climate adaptation, food production, ecology, economic diversification,

We’ll be posting more information on the project as its implementation unrolls. For example see HERE.