The real infrastructure of resilience is relational

When the floods came to villages in southern Poland, the Valencia region of Spain, and the Galați district of Romania in 2024, the first calls for help did not go to distant agencies. They went to people and organisations already known, already trusted, already part of the place.

Among those organisations were three community foundations. Their response, as we documented in our recent publication We Are There: community foundations in emergency response and recovery, was shaped by what they had already built: deep roots in their communities, relationships with local civil society, and the credibility that comes from being present over years rather than arriving with the crisis.

The foundations described acting under uncertainty, coordinating across fragmented systems, and constantly translating among donors, municipalities, volunteers and local organisations. Much of what made this possible was invisible from the outside: the trust they had built over time, the local relationships they could draw on, the informal coordination mechanisms already in place, and the credibility communities recognised long before any emergency. This is the relational infrastructure that crises reveal, the relationships, trust and local connections people rely on to navigate disruption together.

At a time when resilience has become a central concept in discussions around climate adaptation, democratic stability and preparedness, these experiences raise an important question: what makes communities capable of navigating disruption?

Too often, resilience is understood primarily in technical or institutional terms: infrastructure, procedures, logistics, emergency mechanisms. These are, of course, essential. But crises also reveal another layer that is harder to measure and easier to overlook: the civic relationships and local connective capacity that allow communities to act collectively under pressure.

Community foundations can play a central role in shaping this layer of resilience. They do not “arrive” when a crisis starts. Their ability to act in moments of disruption is rooted in years of local presence: building relationships, connecting actors, supporting civic participation, understanding local tensions and capacities, and creating spaces where trust can accumulate over time.

This does not necessarily make them first-line emergency responders in the traditional sense. One of the most striking aspects of the flood responses documented was how differently the foundations positioned themselves.

In Poland, Snow Mountain Community Foundation became deeply operational, moving from village to village, coordinating volunteers and managing flows of material support to affected communities. In Romania, Galați Community Foundation focused on coordination and regranting through trusted local partners. In Spain, Horta Sud Foundation concentrated on protecting and stabilising the wider civic ecosystem across multiple municipalities, resisting pressure to replace existing organisations with parallel structures.

What connected these experiences was not a single model of action, but a shared dependence on relationships, legitimacy and local knowledge. None of these foundations could have acted as they did if they had arrived in the crisis without history. The flexibility to position themselves so differently was itself a product of being embedded enough to read what each context really needed.

Relational work is operational work. Under pressure, it becomes the infrastructure that everything else runs on, shaping both the quality of the immediate response and what remains in place after the first responders leave.

Trust enabled community foundations to make decisions quickly when information was incomplete. Existing relationships reduced transaction costs and allowed coordination to happen informally and rapidly. Credibility made it possible to mobilise donations and cooperation. Long-standing connections with local organisations helped support move without overwhelming already strained communities.

At the same time, these relationships also concentrated pressure. Being trusted meant being constantly approached. Being visible created expectations. Teams had to decide what to take on, what to refuse, and how to remain useful without becoming overstretched. The work was often emotionally and organisationally exhausting precisely because it was relational.

The social dimension of resilience

If resilience depends in part on civic relationships and local connective capacity, then investing in local civic infrastructure is not a support function alongside resilience-building. It is part of resilience-building itself.

This is the implication that the flood experiences point toward, and it sits uncomfortably with how resilience is currently discussed at the European level. Technical preparedness, security responses and emergency mechanisms dominate the debate. The civic and relational capacities that help communities act collectively under pressure receive far less recognition and far less investment.

Preparedness is not only technical. It is social. Communities navigate disruption more effectively when trusted local actors already exist; when organisations know each other well enough to cooperate quickly; when civic organisations have the continuity and legitimacy to adapt as conditions change.

Acting on this means valuing work that is genuinely difficult to fund and to quantify: coordination, convening, relationship-building, the translation work between donors, authorities and communities, the organisational continuity that keeps a foundation recognisable as a credible actor, and the long-term local presence on which all of this depends. None of this shows up well in conventional impact metrics. All of it determines whether the relational infrastructure is there when the next disruption arrives. The ability to act during crises is built slowly, long before crises occur. Recognising this also means broadening how we understand philanthropy infrastructure itself and taking seriously the task of building crisis response capability at the local level, rooted in the community.

This reframes how we should think about community foundations themselves. Not only responders or grantmakers. They are local infrastructure: the civic scaffolding that holds relationships, knowledge and trust in place between crises and makes collective action possible when crises come. Strengthening that local infrastructure is not preparation for resilience-building. It is resilience-building. And it requires sustained investment in the kinds of organisations that can hold that role over time, in the places where it matters.

The floods described in the report were local events, but they raise broader issues. As Europe faces growing climate disruption, social fragmentation and pressure on democratic systems, resilience cannot be understood only as the capacity to respond once emergencies happen. The deeper question is whether the relationships, trust and local civic infrastructure needed to navigate disruption will already exist when they do.