This Research Note applies the concept of ‘resilience’ to explore how Neighbourhood Networks in Leeds in the UK – 37 local community organisations supporting older people – responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights how understanding resilience as a capacity that can be absorptive, adaptive or transformative helps describe the response of community organisations during the pandemic, highlighting a process of ongoing adjustment and innovation as the pandemic evolved. We suggest that the concept of resilience is helpful in this context for understanding how community organisations responded to the emergent nature of the crisis, but it is less effective at revealing why that may have been the case. This limitation notwithstanding, we argue that absorptive, adaptive and transformative capacity ought to be desirable attributes of community organisations if they are distributed equitably and enable them to fulfil their mission and contribute to social change.

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The home is a central place where women's identity as 'mother' is socially constructed and negotiated. Social policy is inexorably implicated in (re)producing these dominant visions of mothers, mothering, home-making and home. Yet, we know very little about how these same social policies are also implicated in women's loss of home. The article begins to address this evidence-gap. It draws on biographical research with homeless women to explore the ways in which key governing frameworks (associated with child protection processes, housing allocation policy and temporary accommodation provision in England) interact with women's status as mother, to shape the spaces they inhabit as home or not-home, materially and emotionally. We present data that illustrates how women's capacity to retain, make or rebuild a family home in times of crisis is significantly hampered by the policies and procedures they encounter in housing and social welfare systems.

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