Sulafa Abushal, GMCA – Faith, young people and resilience: listening before the crisis

• 4th Jul 2026
• Young People

Resilience and emergency planning is not the easiest subject to get young people excited about. Most people are not sitting at home thinking about emergency plans, flood alerts or what they would do if the power went off for three days. They are thinking about school, money, housing, family, safety, health, social media, exams, and all the things already going on in their lives.

Sulafa Abushal

Strategic Policy Lead
Greater Manchester Authority

In reality, resilience is not separate from day-to-day life. It is staying connected, knowing who to turn to, looking after family and neighbours, managing when money is tight, making sense of challenging news cycles, living with the impact of discrimination, navigating hostile online spaces, or trying to imagine a future that feels uncertain.

Before moving into emergency planning and resilience in the public sector, I worked in the VCFSE sector, mainly in community development. That has shaped how I work and think: starting with people, trusting the process, and being comfortable that sometimes you may not know exactly what the outcome will be.

Emergency planning has to work differently. It needs plans, roles, structures and assurance. We need to show that we are ready for the risks we face, and when something happens, we have clear roles and responsibilities and know what to do to keep our communities safe

The interesting bit is how we bring those two ways of working closer together. 

Delivered in communities by Odd Arts and ConnectFutures, CCIN’s Faith, Young People and Resilience Policy Lab project has given us a chance to try this in practice. Led by Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), and funded through the Co-operative Councils’ Innovation Network with additional support from GMCA’s Safer and Stronger Communities team, the project is working with six Greater Manchester local authorities: Wigan, Trafford, Bury, Manchester, Salford and Oldham.

Through the project we are opening up conversations about how young people from faith and culturally diverse communities understand crisis, cohesion and resilience at a time when many communities are carrying a lot. Local, national and global events are shaping how people feel about safety, identity and belonging, and some tensions feel closer to the surface than they have done before. For some communities, these conversations are not abstract. They connect to real experiences of fear, grief, discrimination, uncertainty and being misunderstood.

In the first listening phase of the project, young people have talked about war and conflict, racism, bullying, social media, cost of living, housing, climate change, poverty, hate crime, politics, AI and the lasting impact of COVID-19. Some of those issues sit clearly within emergency planning, others do not. Together, they tell us something important about how young people understand disruption and what it means to keep going when things feel difficult.

We knew a standard emergency planning conversation would not be the right starting point, because it would ask young people to work within a frame we had already created. Odd Arts’ creative approach gives the project a different way in, using “listen and learn” workshops, storytelling, mapping, drawing, collage and discussion to help young people explore crisis, community, faith and belonging in ways that feel grounded in real life. That learning will shape the next stage with ConnectFutures, exploring misinformation, online harms and divisive narratives as part of how young people make sense of safety, disruption and trust.

The project will produce a youth-led Faith, Cohesion and Resilience Toolkit, shaped through further work with young people and partners. That toolkit needs to be practical and useful, but the legacy should be wider than a document. The learning will help shape Greater Manchester’s Community Resilience Framework: our wider approach to strengthening how we work with communities before, during and after disruption. It also gives us a practical example of how lived experience, community knowledge and co-production can shape resilience work, rather than sit alongside it. That learning should be useful beyond Greater Manchester too, helping other areas think about how they involve communities earlier, work across local authority teams and use more co-operative approaches to prepare before a crisis happens.

That feels like the right message to share around Coops Day. Peace, cohesion and resilience are built before the moment of crisis, through trust, relationships, shared learning and people feeling they have a say in what happens around them. For me, that is the real value of the project: listening before the crisis is part of how we prepare.