Carolyn has worked in partnership roles in the voluntary and community sector in Cumbria since 2004. She has been the Community Resilience Coordinator for Cumbria’s Local Resilience Forum since 2019, working across LRF partners to support and build community resilience in the county.

During that time, she’s been involved in the response to and recovery from major flooding (in 2009 and 2015), the Beast from the East (2018), and Storm Arwen (2021), as well as many smaller incidents. During the Coronavirus pandemic, she led Cumbria’s LRF’s Community Resilience work, and was awarded an MBE for this work.

Her work currently focusses on Cumbria’s Innovative Flood Resilience Programme (CiFR), funded by Defra as part of the £200 million Flood and Coastal Innovation Programmes which is managed by the Environment Agency, which is testing and evaluating new ways to make communities more resilience to flood risks.