As part of its four-year strategy, the European Social Network (ESN) launched the Transformation and Resilience Working Group, which has ran between 2022 - 2025 to promote peer exchange on ways to ensure social services’ transformation and resilience to guarantee the continuity of social services in crisis situations.
The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the critical need for social services to adapt to and withstand crises while continuing to support vulnerable populations. At the same time, climate change intensifies the frequency and severity of natural disasters, geopolitical instability fuels refugee crises and conflicts, whilst digital crises may disrupt essential social services putting vulnerable populations at greater risk. In this context, to ensure the resilience of social services to crises, the need for robust crisis management frameworks is more urgent than ever.
This briefing has been drafted in the framework of the 2025 Annual Meeting of the European Social Network’s ‘Social Services Transformation and Resilience’ Working Group.
The meeting brought together social services directors from across Europe to work together towards a proposal for the key components of a Social Services Crisis Management Framework. Our proposal for this framework includes the following components:
- Leadership and Workforce Training
- Technology and Information Systems
- Organisational Agility and Interagency
- Cooperation, Systematic Risk and Threat Assessment
- Transparency and Communication
ESN members from the following countries completed the questionnaire: Belgium, Finland, United Kingdom, Austria, Spain, France, Latvia, Greece, Italy, Croatia, Czechia, Switzerland, Germany, Slovenia, Israel, and the Netherlands.
An Executive Summary of the briefing can be downloaded in English, French, German, and Spanish.