Dear <<Full name>>,
 
It is my great pleasure to share with you the Partners for Resilience (PfR) newsletter. It is a first great collection of stories from local communities and civil society organisations that work together with one common ambition: to save and protect lives through disaster risk reduction.
 
PfR pro-actively works to reduce disaster risk at a landscape scale, however not all disasters can be prevented. With collective action we can reduce their impact. And save lives and livelihoods. Applying an Integrated Risk Management (IRM) approach increases the resilience of communities and reduces the risks of disasters happening. Acknowledging that the world’s problems are complex and interconnected, integrated solutions are required.

Such solutions will not bear fruit when confined to the offices and minds of individuals and organisations. They need to be designed with the people they serve, be tested, shared and discussed. And when solutions do not yield the intended results, we need to investigate failures, and apply the learnings. While PfR uses social media extensively to promote its approach, not all of its learnings can be presented within the bite-sized, 280-character chunks offered on Twitter. Hence this newsletter combines concise and to-the-point stories, with an occasional deep-dive into the complexity of today’s problems and the integrated solutions that are needed to address them.
 
By sharing these stories with you, we hope to inspire through the learnings from the collective action of communities, civil society organisations, knowledge institutes and policy makers, to strengthen communities' resilience and the capacity of civil society organisations. I invite you to share or subscribe to this newsletter, and in doing so, support us to expand the network of change-makers.
 
Juriaan Lahr,
Chairman Partners for Resilience

After national and regional preparatory meetings during the past months, PfR partners attended the bi-annual Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction, held from 15-17 May in Geneva. This year's theme: "Resilience Dividend - Towards Sustainable and Inclusive Societies".

A special networking event took place on Wednesday 15th May: “We Bend We Do Not Break”, hosted by the Partners for Resilience, co-hosted by the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC), The Nature Conservancy, and the Partnership for Environment and Disaster Risk Reduction (PEDRR). During this event integrated approaches for building disaster risk reduction and resilience were presented. Work was showcased on enabling multi-stakeholder dialogue and programmes that strengthen community resilience by integrating climate risks and ecosystem solutions. 

Take a look at PfR's website for more information regarding PfR at the Global Platform, as well as on the Networking event.

With great pleasure we announce that the ECO-DRR Project Cooperation Agreement between UN-Environment and the Partners for Resilience has been signed. The project will run until December 2021 and the official project kick-off took place on May 13th in Geneva. Inception Workshops in the five implementation countries will be organised in June and July this year. 

Eco-DRR recognizes that ecosystems can provide disaster risk reduction services as well as offer other ecosystem services of productive and cultural value, which also contribute to building local resilience to disasters and climate change.