Key Actions for Psychosocial Support in Flooding

This material provides key actions on psychosocial support in flooding. It focuses on flooding of urban areas and on how to strengthen the resilience of urban communities. The material helps prioritise actions and supports integrating psychosocial support in the overall actions. Each crisis and response is unique. Crisis implies impossible time constraints, extreme demands on resources and imperfect choices. It will very rarely be relevant or possible to implement all key actions for every crisis. Therefore, the material is modular; written to supports the design of the best possible actions in a given crisis. Key actions are divided according to disaster phases; preparedness, response and recovery. The material can be used as reference tool in the middle of a crisis, to prepare and plan for community engagement for flooding, or both. This material is for organisations that want to engage with urban individuals, families, social networks and communities on psychosocial support in flooding. It is written for psychosocial advisors and general crisis managers. However, volunteers and community leaders will also find is useful as it provides very practical directions on what activities to do first. It is developed with the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement in mind, but can be adapted for use by non-governmental and civil society organisation as well as local, regional and national governmental agencies with relative ease. A separate toolbox contains the most relevant tools for psychosocial support in flooding situations. It consists of an overview of the tools, followed by a detailed description of each of the tools and how to adapt them to flooding situations.