Leadership at the local level: Community participation in Municipality of Amadora (Portugal)
This paper is the result of collaboration between the Municipality of Amadora (Portugal), the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and an Australian member of an international research team, which has been involved in community engagement. This publication explores the stakeholder engagement process by the Municipality of Amadora to build community resilience.
The lessons learned provided in this document (p. 20-21) are the following:
- The efforts of the campaign team have resulted in increased interest from stakeholders in seeking information on risks and disasters.
- It was important for the team to adapt their strategy to meet the needs of each target audience, to implement the concepts of risk, disaster and resilience.
- The most collaborative and participatory public was always school students. The less-educated population,
immigrants and the elderly people showed a lack of interest in the beginning, which was solved with practical actions with emergency institutions. - To keep disaster risk reduction on the agenda, it is important that people feel that something is being done.
- The authors also learnt the importance of finding an entry point that is of importance to each target audience, as well as of designing interactive education/training engagement strategies.
This document is an input paper of the 2015 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction.
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