Community Risk Practitioners
Every day, thousands of people all over the world are helping their communities to make sense of risk. Many are doing this with limited support or tools.
But despite the different cultures and varied environments they each work in, they often have similar needs. Diverse risk practitioners are making many of the same discoveries about what they and their communities need for deciding the weight to give to information about risks.
Read More ...Alejandra AlbuerneArchitectural Engineer and Construction HistorianInfrastructure | Assessing Risks & Trade-offsEurope | GLOBALWorking in Nepal after the 2015 earthquakes, the communities saw the concrete buildings that had survived the earthquakes as the buildings they would feel safe living in, but as an engineer, my perception of the risk was very different. In a different earthquake, many of those would not have been safe either. The buildings we designed had to be structurally sound and also make the community feel safe in them, as they were the ones that had to live in the buildings. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Adam ParnellDirector (Maritime) - CHIRP Aviation and Maritime Confidential Incident ReportingMaritime | Assessing Risks & Trade-offsEurope | GLOBALThere is what we can call a ‘culture of compliance’, where people are signing to say they’ve done things that they haven’t because they don’t have the time. For example, people sign to say they did an in-depth check on a certain piece of equipment or carried out maintenance work on it but only because they’re supposed to have done it and are pressurised to show that it’s done. However, everyone knows they didn’t, but they’ll lose their job if they don’t sign and say it was done. Of course, what they’re doing is then taking the personal liability on to themselves. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Anthony WarnerChef and Food WriterSociety & Culture | Assessing Risks & Trade-offsEurope | UNITED KINGDOMPeople are capable of complex and nuanced risk calculations on many topics. But we often also have blind spots where we overestimate or underestimate the risks or the benefits… I see this with people choosing to cut out food groups, overestimating the benefit this might have and underestimating the risks it could pose to their health. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Cameron ByerleyAssistant Professor of MathematicsEducation & Training | Training & SupportNorth America | USAThe motivation behind our project is our experience in math education and research on how people think about relative size, percentages, fractions, ratios, and proportions. When I was watching the media in the COVID pandemic, I knew that making sense of the percentages was going to be hard for people because if you think about your everyday life, do you know how risky driving somewhere is as a percent? Do you know how risky anything really is as a percent? When you hear on the news, that you have a 10% risk or 1% risk, it’s very hard to make sense of what that really means. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Chioma Blaise ChikereDirector of Entrepreneurship Centre - University of Port HarcourtEducation & Training | Environment | Training & SupportAfrica | NIGERIAThe community didn’t understand what was happening, but they knew their crops were dying, they knew the soil was not productive. It was the underlying problems associated with contaminated crops, soil and the health risks due to oil pollution that were not known to them. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Bambang Hero SaharjoFire Forensics Specialist, Professor of the Environment and Forest Fires - Bogor Agricultural UniveEnvironment | Context & CommunityAsia | INDONESIAFor many of these communities, it is not easy to change behaviour. They might understand the risks but if there aren’t alternative ways for them to have an income, they will find it hard to stop what they are doing. They need support or to see other communities that have been successful. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Amos ZachariaAnaesthesiologist & HOD - Mbeya Zonal Referral Hospital, University of Dar es Salaam, Mbeya CollegePublic Health | Training & SupportAfrica | TANZANIAIn developing countries, many patients lack perioperative education. The time they spend with a surgeon or anaesthetist in a clinic before surgery is very short. These healthcare providers are few and are expected to attend many cases until late hours. We therefore need to introduce patients ‘perioperative information/education leaflets in both urban and rural hospitals. There is room to study how effectively this intervention will be delivered based on the cultural and economic differences between regions. Will electronic versions or hardcopies work equally? Are there other methods which can work better in developing countries to make sure people have access to the information patterning... SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Ben BaileyDirector, Advocacy and Regional Engagement - The Mission to SeafarersMaritime | Context & CommunityEurope | UNITED KINGDOMThe cultural element when it comes to dealing with seafarers is fundamental, and it’s often the most overlooked part. Maybe we have approached the issue from our own cultural context, or we tried to apply our own perspective when speaking to seafarers from other regions, but it turns out, actually, they have a completely different view. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Anik SinghaSenior Officer- Beximco Pharmaceuticals LtdPublic Health | Assessing Risks & Trade-offsAsia | BANGLADESHI work in the industrial sector or private sector in Bangladesh. Specifically, the industry is related and responsible for manufacturing life-saving drugs required by healthcare-practitioners, healthcare facilities and their staffs, also general public ill or non-ill. It is also known as pharmaceuticals sector. Key risks and issues anyone working in this area needs to be aware of, a) Adverse event (AE) related with drug administration (pre & post). This event might lead to other serious event(s); extreme being, fatality. There is also possibilities of adverse drug reaction (ADR). I was also made aware of Pharmacovigilance (PV) as one of major Issues in risk assessment and management in... SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Cecelia AnaniasFounder - ONG AmarantaEducation & Training | Context & CommunitySouth America | CHILEIn the area of cyberbullying and many cases of violence too, it's very important to confront this as a community. My organization works to address any areas of lack of knowledge, but we also encourage the creation of communities that together can come together to make certain decisions and find a natural way to be on the internet. Having that community support can help if you are a victim of cyberbullying, to not go through it alone and to see how you can recover from it. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Becky JonesScience Communications ProfessionalCommunication | Information Framing & ManipulationEurope | UNITED KINGDOMMentioning the role of the animal in biomedical research is vital for transparent communication and managing expectations. For example, the majority of media coverage for Alzheimer’s omits that research was conducted with mice. By the time it gets to the public, people think ‘this is great, there is a cure coming and it’s obviously being tested with humans!’. However, if you go back to the original research that it is coming from, it shows that research was conducted on six mice. People don’t realise that a lot of everyday medicines have also come through animal testing and knowing that is important when discussing and deciding on whether you are for or against such research. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Bernard OkebeRadio Journalist and Coordinator - Community Empowerment and Media InitiativeCommunication | Context & CommunityAfrica | KENYAIt is very helpful to speak to others in other communities about these topics and share stories because different communities understand and deal with risks and hazards in different ways and therefore understanding such, especially risk, from the community perspective is very important whenever we talk of risks. This will help in minimizing or reducing risks in communities/societies. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Aliya Syahreni PrihartadiDoctorPublic Health | Assessing Risks & Trade-offsEurope | UNITED KINGDOMConveying and assessing risks is central to my role. A big part of my job is to explain diseases, its progression and its wider management to increase quality of life. We have to help people make informed decisions for their own health however with each decision there are always risks and benefits whether it be starting a medication or choosing an invasive intervention. It's very common for people to misunderstand what doctors say due to medical jargons as many of the terminologies are foreign to non-health professionals. To help them make informed decisions, the UK healthcare system, for invasive interventions or high risk medications, provide leaflets with clear jargon-free information... SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Ceri DaviesProject Manager - UNDP ZambiaCommunity Development | Context & CommunityAfrica | ZAMBIAThe types of risk information related to a variety of areas included environmental, health, livelihood risks. For example, with the COVID-19 pandemic, information was communicated regarding the risks of the disease and means of prevention, where to seek help etc. For environmental related risks, several project activities focused on increasing the knowledge of community members on environmentally hazardous practices (e.g. charcoal production), the consequences, and alternatives. The challenges were differences in understanding (lack of awareness/knowledge), complexity of concepts (i.e. something new that was difficult to understand/fathom), language barriers. Adapting communication/messages... SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Chandler ChristoffelUser Experience Librarian - UGA LibrariesEducation & Training | Information Framing & ManipulationNorth America | USAMy job is to help people find the information sources they need. But I also want to encourage information literacy - to interrogate some of their assumptions about what is reliable. As we look at search results together, I might point out different points of view, agendas and rhetorical strategies. We might start with sources from local, state or regional governments, then go to national governments and international agencies. After that, we might explore the grey literature, say from think tanks and NGOs. I also recommend tertiary information (handbooks, encyclopedias), which is great for non-specialists, and we look at the sources they use. We can suggest statistics databases that provide... SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Brianne De ManManager, Charitable Programs - Binner’s ProjectSociety & Culture | Training & SupportNorth America | CANADAMany of the binners we work with are on our staff team, and since they are on the payroll they are required by HR to go through occupational health and safety training. We have worked to create an accessible version of the OH&S material so binners get the necessary information without having to go through an online course. It is more about highlighting the things that apply to them versus things that may not be relevant to them. For example, they would not need to think about seating ergonomics since they are not working at a desk, but it’s important for them to know to not put their hands straight into a waste bag but to dump the contents onto a table and then sort through it. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Arish HaiderDoctor - The Koohi Goth HospitalPublic Health | Context & CommunityAsia | PAKISTANOne of the challenges e face is the cultural position of a traditional birth attendant (days). These women have no formal training in birthing practices, are inexperienced in medicine, and have zero knowledge of surgical hygiene. They are unable to support a woman through healthy labour, and can be dangerous to the mother and child's wellbeing. The risk these practices pose to the community is great. The only one way to overcome this is to train community midwives who possess both the skills and knowledge to carry out safe birth. In short, midwives save lives. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Barry DunneEHS Manager - JMG Solutions LtdMaritime | Information Framing & ManipulationEurope | UNITED KINGDOMI spend a lot of time developing risk assessments and method statements to have procedures in place to work. And then you do your initial induction safety brief, and you have a 42-page document in English. But half of the people on my team are not native English speakers. If I was given that myself as an English reader, I would not be able to consume that. So, what I often do is reduce the text by more than half and use photographs. It streamlines the process, and you can also use it to point at a picture and go yes or no; everybody understands yes and no. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Aaron TaylorHire Assistant at Stour KayakCommunication | Context & CommunityEurope | UNITED KINGDOMIt’s important that we strike a balance between positivity and informality and ensure the customers are aware of the risks inherent to the activity. We also need to make sure that the means of mitigating those risks are covered. Going over the risks associated with kayaking can be dry and boring, and if we were to list all the risks sequentially, the listener would just switch off. They’ll start focusing on other things. They become over-stimulated and then choose to not listen to any of the information. So, we try to inject humour and positivity into our pre-activity safety and risk briefings, keeping it relatively informal. This ensures that the kayakers concentrate and are better able... SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Amy PedenResearcher/Lecturer in Injury Prevention, Epidemiology and Control - University of New South WalesEducation & Training | Public Health | Assessing Risks & Trade-offsOceania | AUSTRALIACommunicating the need to swim between the flags and having patrolled beaches is important and a vital part of preventing drowning. Conversely, rivers are the leading location of drownings, and we don’t have the benefit of years of education, life-saving clubs, and lifeguarded locations where it is safe to swim. Our work on media communication has shown that it’s partly because people just don’t hear about drowning at these locations. When it doesn’t happen in the cities or along the coast, it’s not reported as often in the media. Rivers are the area of highest risk but are not perceived as such, because they don’t benefit from the funding, the awareness, and the preventative... SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Community risk practitioners
Hear from people around the world leading conversations on risks in their communities
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THEME
Media Spokesperson - Changing Cities Berlin
Chief Executive - FISH Safety Foundation
Field Director - Kibale Forest Schools Program (KFSP) / The Kasiisi Project
Director of Communications, Ciencia Puerto Rico; Director, Aquí Nos Cuidamos
Communications coordinator for Breathe Mongolia
Director of Entrepreneurship Centre - University of Port Harcourt
Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Head of Office, Catholic Relief Services
Water Treatment Professional
Chef and Food Writer
Immunologist, Public Health Advocate, & Former Vice-Chancellor - University of KwaZulu-Natal
Journalist - Maldita Ciencia
Marine Biologist, General Manager - Oracabessa Bay Fish Sanctuary
Founder - 'Your Local Epidiemologist'
Clean Air Advocates - Green School Runs
Doctor and Director Planning, Research and Statistics
Co-Founder and Director - InteGRAL: Intersectional Gender Research Advocacy and Learning
Executive Director - The Golden Eye Foundation, Oracabessa Marine Trust
Group Leader for Regulatory Science - International Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology
Public Health Advocate
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