The took place in Lisbon on the 22^nd and 23^rd of May 2018. The aim was to show the project’s main findings to an international audience of decision-makers, practitioners, and researchers.  Participants experienced and discussed the main outcome from the project – a child-centred disaster management framework for Europe, which will help those working in the field engage with young people in emergency planning and disaster risk reduction. Young people who participated in CUIDAR’s activities were actively engaged during the event.

Participants

Close to 130 stakeholders participated (see below), plus 19 young people who had worked on CUIDAR throughout and took part in the Finale workshops (nine from Portugal, six from Italy and four from Spain).

Participants in the CUIDAR Finale

• Portugal (42)
• United Kingdom (36)
• Spain (18)
• Italy (12)
• Greece (8)
• Japan (3)
• Australia (2)
• Belgium (2)
• Brazil (2)
• USA (2)
• France (1)

The event included poster presentations on projects about disaster risk reduction, public understanding of disaster/hazard warnings and/or the perspectives of children and young people. In total, were presented at the event.

Programme

The first session was mostly of an academic nature, starting with a keynote speech by Lori Peek, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Natural Hazards Research Centre (University of Colorado Boulder, US) and co-author of the book Children of Katrina (University of Texas Press, 2015) with Alice Fothergill. This was followed by a panel discussion on ‘Disasters in a Global Perspective: working with children, families and communities’, chaired by Antony Spalton (Risk Reduction and Resilience Specialist, UNICEF), with the participation of Professor Aya Goto (Fukushima Medical University, Japan), Professor Mervyn Hyde (University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia), Professor Manuel Tironi (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, via Skype) and Dr Briony Towers (RMIT University, Australia).

The abstracts and PowerPoints of these presentations can be found in the event and in the booklet distributed during the event.

The first day ended with a poster session, in which authors and other participants had the chance to discuss the findings over a welcome drink.

Day Two was mostly stakeholder-oriented and devoted to showcasing the CUIDAR results. First, the CUIDAR International Film was presented by Professor Maggie Mort who explained the process behind the production of the film. Next, six thematic workshops were conducted by the CUIDAR partner teams, some with the participation of young people involved in the project:

• Participative approaches: building disaster resilience with children and young people, Save the Children, Italy
• The participation of children with sensory disabilities in disaster risk reduction, University of Thessaly, Greece
• Children and Disaster Risk Reduction in dialogue: an interactive exhibition, ICS-ULisboa, Portugal
• Making young people visible in disasters: problematising preparedness in public space, UOC, Spain
• Flood Snakes & Ladders: interactive workshop, ����̽̽App, UK
• Putting it all into Practice, Save the Children, UK

The workshop abstracts, the PowerPoints of the presentations and short reports on each workshop (written by teams and members of the Advisory and Ethics Boards) can be found in the event .

Day 2 morning was ended by Ana Sotto-Mayor, member of the CUIDAR Ethics Board, thanking young people for their participation and offering them the chance to reflect on their perceptions and experiences with CUIDAR. During the afternoon the 19 youngsters went on a ‘paper chase’ in Lisbon city centre.

After lunch the CUIDAR Child-Centred Disaster Management Framework for Europe was presented by the ����̽̽App team. Each participant was given a Framework Box (see Fig 5), containing the Framework booklet, a Key Messages card (in ‘LogoLoop’ form), a Finale postcard on which participants wrote pledges (afterwards inserted in a custom-made post-box), and a pen drive containing the CUIDAR international film and other resources. Professor Mort’s Prezi presentation is available online and all the materials from the box are available on the project .

We received 53 postcards from people with Pledges – here are some examples:

• I will… Work every day thinking to include your voice in DDR projects.
• We will improve the educational project on forest fires, making it more participatory for children and guide them to communicate the message to the rest of the community. The result could be a community more prepared for the wildfires.
• I will… Carry out more and more investigation studies to effect children’s resilience after natural disaster.
• I will… Share the CUIDAR message and materials with others through my networks. Implement the participatory practises in my research, teaching, and professional leadership roles, to the extent I can. Offer to be of support and service to the team to assist as I can. Influence policy makers to update the message. Thank you so much for your voice and leadership. Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the UK and Europe- you are GLOBAL role models for so much good! Thank you.
• I will… Do my best so that the project CUIDAR reaches more children and young people.
• I will… 1. Explore how children might shape content of flood warning messages to ensure it includes what they want to know. 2. Consider how we might use children as a starting point to build resilience in communities i.e. identifying groups they belong to and seeing if they would like to work with us.

The following panel discussion  ‘Policy Responses to the Framework and issues raised by CUIDAR’, was chaired by Dr Cath Larkins (Co-Director of the Centre for Children & Young People’s Participation, University of Central Lancashire, UK) with the participation of stakeholders from the five CUIDAR countries: Andrea Nobili (Marche Region Children and Young Peoples Ombudsman, Italy); Julie Walker (Strategic Resilience Lead, Greater Manchester Combined Authority, UK); Luís Carvalho (Civil Protection Municipal Service, Municipality of Amadora and Coordinator of the United Nations Resilient Cities Program in Portugal); Sergio Delgado (Deputy-Director of Civil Protection of Catalonia, Spain) and Zafeiria Kollia (Head of Department of Volunteerism & Training, General Secretariat for Civil Protection, Greece). The PowerPoints of the presentations are available on the .

The event ended with closing remarks from Helen Braithwaite OBE (Assistant Director of UK Resilience, Training, Doctrine and Standards; UK Cabinet Office – Civil Contingencies Secretariat) and Jorge Dias (Senior Officer for the Communication and Awareness Division, Portuguese National Authority for Civil Protection, representing the Secretary of State of Civil Protection).

Keeping in touch

The CUIDAR Finale had significant showing on social media and the Twitter account @CUIDARProject carries on

• there were more than 100 tweets using #CuidarFinale;
• In the Portuguese Facebook page, the CUIDAR post about CUIDAR Framework was shared 13 time and reached 3,827 people. Posts about the event were also published by the National Civil Protection Authority, the Amadora Municipality civil protection department and a Fire Department in the vicinity of Lisbon.

In terms of media in Portugal, the press release was published by an . Afterwards, one national radio station in Portugal published a on the event and in another station the event was discussed in a weekly .

Teams continue to receive very positive feedback from the stakeholders present in the event. ����̽̽App received emails from the Grenfell Health and Wellbeing Adults Service expressing the benefits of hearing about and linking up with the responses internationally which will be useful in how they shape their programmes going forward, as well as the intention of following up with a few of the speakers and facilitators. The Portuguese team received an email from the Senior Officer of Communication and Awareness Division at the Portuguese National Authority for Civil Protection requesting a meeting to present the CUIDAR findings to other officers and to explore of further collaboration. The Italian team received positive feedback from the Marche Region Civil Protection agency, who participated at the event and they proposed to disseminate the Italian CUIDAR Policy Brief  to the local municipalities and to meet again to explore future collaborations.

2017 was a year with headlines dominated by disasters in the UK. The devastating fire at Grenfell tower; attacks at Manchester Arena, Westminster, Finsbury Park and London Bridge; major flooding and storm Brian all rocked the country.

Save the Children is clear that the conversation about how we respond to such emergencies must include marginalised and vulnerable communities and, crucially, we must do more to listen to one of the most excluded and under-estimated voices – the voice of children.

Largely, when thinking of children caught in disasters we think of their vulnerability and immediate actions we can take to keep them safe. Less often do we dig deeper and consider children’s unique perspectives, needs, opinions and experience of disasters. Very rarely do we consider their competencies, and their ability to actively contribute to planning, provision and recovery.

Save the Children is involved in a pan-European project which aims to rectify this.

Giving Children a Voice

CUIDAR (Take Care) is a project which makes sure children are prepared for emergencies. Working across five EU countries it aims to build their knowledge, resilience and make sure their voices are heard in emergency planning and response.

In the UK Save the Children worked with primary school children aged 9-11 years to influence local and national decision-makers to make sure children’s perspectives are considered in disasters.

Through workshops, community learning events and a high-level national conference, our group of nearly 200 children have learned about emergencies and have shared their thoughts and opinions with local and national decision-makers.

“I learnt that us children should be heard in our own opinion and adults should take it seriously… Children need to know what is going on in the situation so the children are not scared.”

Lilly, Student from England

The core ethos of this work is active and meaningful participation: engaging children who are impacted by decisions and policies, and ensuring they themselves can help shape those plans. Through CUIDAR (Take Care), children have built their knowledge about safe practices, whilst advising adults about how they feel and what they might need in an emergency. This has helped professionals to realise the value of children’s knowledge and the potential of giving them more agency in emergencies.

In 2018, we will work with the consortium to launch an advisory framework that incorporates the learning from all partners and contributes to EU-wide best practice in this field.

As a starting point, we have produced a �����Ի��� which outlines the project and guides providers through how to deliver it effectively.

The Value of a Different Perspective

Our work with children must recognise them as experts in their own right. Children have a unique ability to see things differently and not only identify gaps in existing provisions, but also contribute to innovative solutions. Through projects like CUIDAR (Take Care), we can bring together traditional “teaching” about preparedness and prevention along with a more empowering, child-led, two-way learning process. This helps increase awareness and resilience amongst children, but also amongst emergency planners and communities too.

With appropriate safeguards, we must trust in children’s capabilities. Children can be powerful communicators within their family, peer group, and wider community. In our project, children helped to spread learning across schools and communities, including taking vital safety messages home to parents.

We know that if you involve and respect children in emergency preparedness and response, their readiness and resilience grows. Preparing them not only keeps children safer from risks but helps prepare future generations too.

These seminars have given me the opportunity to share what we have learned from UK Children, Young People and Flooding and EU CUIDAR projects, talking about some of the creative methods we used and how these supported the children we worked with to articulate their experiences and knowledge of disaster. Staff and students from across FMU have attended, including departments of psychiatry and disaster psychiatry, nursing, community medicine, linguistics, radiation and medical education. One seminar participant commented that it has helped her to think of disasters not just as ‘natural’ and that she will ‘pay more attention’ to issues of social injustice, disadvantage and vulnerability, aspects that she said ‘require us to be proactive, rather than responsive’ to disasters. Here you can see Fukushima Medical University staff and graduate students, as well as local residents exploring the usefulness of a game developed from our flood research for local resilience building: ‘Flood Snakes & Ladders’.

Alongside these seminars, I have attended workshops for public health nurses that Prof Goto regularly runs in the local community. In one workshop Prof Goto was training nurses to develop and manage their own projects, including with evacuee communities where ongoing health concerns remain a priority for those affected by the 2011 disaster, especially older people. I also attended a lecture for nurses on understanding radiation. Risk communication remains an important issue for health sector workers, especially as communities return to areas formerly evacuated because of the high levels of radiation.

The town of Yamakiya is one such area – the evacuation order was only lifted at the end of March this year and it was therefore chosen as the location for the latest Fukushima Dialogue Meeting, organised by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP). I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the Dialogue and it provided a rich opportunity to learn more about people’s experiences of recovery. A major theme was the value placed on cultural heritage. The area is primarily rural and people talked about the importance – and joy – found in the landscape, as well as the problems of ‘waste management.’ Fields are still full of plastic bags of contaminated soil, which, as several local people described, both despoil the landscape for those returning to live there and contribute to outsiders’ fears about the region. There was also much discussion about the lack of young people returning to the area. The mayor explained that so far, only 270 out of 1000 people have returned and two thirds of these are over 65. As he pointed out, the issue of an ageing population is a national trend so he suggested that communities such as Yamakiya are ‘ahead’ of other places in having to address the challenges this creates and exploring how to make their town a place where younger generations want to live.

During this visit I have been able to work with some of Fukushima’s young people, running several follow-up workshops with the children who took part in our research project last year, as well as groups from other local schools. I have been struck, as before, by these young people’s optimism about the future and their ability to reflect on their experiences and insights in thinking about community development. I hope that more work can be done to include children and young people in discussions about the ongoing recovery process here. They have much to contribute and, as has been noted, it is they who must shape the future of Fukushima.

So begins the account of a powerful interaction between children and young people, practitioners and policy makers in disaster management and risk reduction held for the CUIDAR project in Barcelona. The quote is from a leading expert in civil protection from the Catalan Government. The Open University of Catalonia has published a number of articles in English, Spanish and Catalan by researchers, science communicators and academic staff aimed at bringing people in closer contact with science.  Israel Rodriguez Giralt, a member of the CUIDAR team, writes about the project and the importance of participation as a tool for building resilience in children and young people in disaster situations. You can read the English version of his article .

We approached Amatrice through wooded hillsides, mountains in the distance, white clouds, the road twisting and climbing through tight bends. At first, all seemed peaceful, until an eerie sense of desertion set in. The fields were empty of workers and livestock. Then houses that looked perfectly sound showed vertical cracks in their structure. We passed the first demolished houses on the outskirts of the village, a crane at work, plaster dust choking the air as we followed a track built from the hardcore of fallen buildings. We were greeted by volunteer aid workers, clearly traumatised from their nightmare of pulling survivors from their homes. We met children in the improvised school, saw the work Save the Children was doing to give them some continuity, glimpsed the fallen church and ruined high street, cordoned off where so many people had died. The sense of human solidarity was both palpable and moving. What struck me when making the visit and in writing the poem afterwards was the sense of the cataclysmic cancellation of people’s futures, the immense effort to re-engage, the formation of an imaginative capacity that, from now on, would have to take account of such events.

Translation provided by CUIDAR partners Anna Grisi and Flaminia Cordani
of Save the Children Italy.

Photos © Graham Mort

Amatrice

The sound of dust sifting to dust; an almost
silence, almost touchable. We took

the new track built from rubble – the old hair-
pin road collapsing into woods –

through a mist of talc where they were pulling
down a house; past police cars, aid

trucks, houses cracked open in spoiled clutches
and hens running wild under our

tyres, over the whisper of fallen chestnut leaves.
The mountains were the same, we

guessed: clouds puffing out their slow white
smoke above a village of tents, a

new school timbered by joiners from the north.
The main street tilted in my lens, the

church steeple that killed a family in their beds,
the old school fallen from itself into a

kind of ignorance. Workers who’d pulled the dead
from sleep joined our photograph:

volunteers, their eyes hard to bear. They took
our hands, didn’t want to let us leave

just then, as if we were a lost future’s children
straying home. Amatrice, they said,

bearing witness, their blue jackets torn at the
sleeves. Amatrice: its leaves shivering,

their palms unreadable, lying still in ours.

Amatrice

Il suono della polvere ritorna polvere; un
silenzio che e’ quasi possibile toccare. Abbiamo preso

il nuovo sentiero costruito tra le macerie –
la vecchia strada collassa nei boschi –

attraverso una foschia di talco dove stavano abbattendo una casa;
passano macchine della polizia, camion
con gli aiuti, case squarciate
e le galline che corrono sotto i nostri

pneumatici, oltre il sussurro delle foglie di castagne cadute.
Le montagne erano le stesse, abbiamo

immaginato: nuvole che soffiano il loro lento bianco
fumo sopra un villaggio di tende, la

nuova scuola forgiata dai falegnami del nord.
La strada principale inclinata nella mia lente, il

campanile della chiesa che uccise una famiglia nei loro letti,
la vecchia scuola caduta su se stessa in una

specie di ignoranza. Lavoratori che avevano tirato fuori i morti
dai letti si uniscono alla nostra fotografia:

i volontari, i loro occhi difficili da sopportare. Loro hanno preso
le nostre mani, e non volevano lasciarci andare

proprio allora, mentre andavamo a casa,
come se fossimo i figli di un futuro perso. Amatrice, hanno detto

ne e’ testimone, le loro giacche azzurre strappate nelle
maniche. Amatrice: le sue foglie tremano,

i loro palmi inossidabili, si stringono ancora ai nostri.

Graham Mort, from ‘Black Shiver Moss’, Seren, 2017.

The were initiated in autumn 2011 by the ICRP and are held several times a year. The aim, the ICRP states, is to bring together ‘experts, authorities, professionals, NGOs, local communities and representatives of Belarusian, Norwegian and French organisations with direct experience in managing long-term consequences of the Chernobyl accident, to find ways to respond to the challenges of the long term consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi accident.’ The latest Dialogue, ‘What do we need for our future?’ took place in the context of the recent removal of evacuation orders in most of Fukushima Prefecture. The meeting focused on residents’ views of the current situation and their hopes for Fukushima’s long-term recovery.

At the meeting Alison Lloyd Williams presented a short introducing the theatre project, which took place in 2016 with students at Tsukidate Elementary School in Date City. The video highlighted some of the children’s ideas for developing their community and argued for the need for children to be involved in planning for the future. The former school principal also spoke at the meeting, along with one of the students who took part – the youngest person ever to address the Dialogue. Both talked about how the project had helped the students to develop confidence in making and acting on decisions together. As the of the Dialogue notes: central to building the future in Fukushima is the importance of ‘becoming actors instead of victims.’

The children participated from a wide range of cultural and socio economic contexts such as places that experienced or have been affected by disasters; areas of high deprivation; urban, coastal and rural areas with some sites including migrant children from different ethnic groups. Participants with specific known vulnerabilities for example, hard of hearing students and students with low and severe visual impairments were also enabled to take part. The children consulted were mostly aged 9-11 years with young people from 14 to 18 years old.

Facilitated by CUIDAR staff, along with specialists in children’s participation and school staff, the workshops were designed to empower children to realise their right to be heard and to take part in decisions that affect them. The workshops began with games relating to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, with a specific focus on Article 12: ‘children’s participation’.  The majority of children had little knowledge about their rights and the importance of their active participation, associating this mainly with the idea of helping at home, or sharing ideas, participating in leisure activities, volunteering or taking on responsibilities to help younger students. Throughout the CUIDAR workshops other ideas about participation emerged such as ‘expressing opinions’; ‘being people’; ‘having things to tell’; ‘having equal rights’, and ‘boys and girls express themselves differently and this difference has to be taken into account’.

Then the dialogues children held with peers, school staff, parents and the local community in each partner country were used to develop Communication Plans. These aimed to identify ways of communicating what they and others can do to increase resilience and reduce risk within their community. This included how to inform their peers, teachers, community members and practitioners, taking into account the needs of different audiences, for example thinking about those with sensory disabilities and language or literacy problems, using various media such as drama, posters and stories.

Professor Mort said: ‘it was fascinating to see how tactile and 3-D approaches can be used with adults who are unused to articulating experience through non-verbal methods’. The workshop included a task to sensitise policymakers and practitioners to the needs and perspectives of disaster-affected children living in Europe.