Recent crises, from the Covid-19 pandemic to the fallout of the Ukraine war and the cost-of-living crisis, have demonstrated the vital role of social services in caring for those made vulnerable. However, after years of underinvestment, social services have been stripped considerably of the financial, human, and infrastructure resources needed to provide quality care and support. Social services resilience is about strengthening the capacity of social services organisations, their workforce, and the communities they support to better deal with and adapt to these shocks.

Resilience has been a central theme of our work since 2020 with the webinars on social services responses to the social consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. Our 2021 seminar focused on supporting social services to be better placed to respond to people’s needs and ensuring care and support continuity in times of crisis. As a follow-up to this seminar, we launched a working group to understand the needs of social services and develop recommendations to build their resilience to ensure their continuity of care and support.