Building community resilience is gaining its importance due to the increasing uncertainty of magnitude and impact of floods. Studies of community resilience have been conducted over decades, but the gap is remaining persist particularly to link the complexity of the two concepts of community and resilience which working across scales. Studies find that social learning is an important aspect for community resilience to bridge those concepts. The question is how does community learn to be resilience and to what extent social learning occurs across scales. This paper aims at exploring the social learning at the vulnerable community by considering resources, actions and disaster risk governance. Vulnerable communities in Surabaya and Medan are selected as case studies and the analysis is based on field-studies in 2015-2018. The results show that social learning in two case studies is diverse referring to the risk perception and to formal flood protection and flood risk governance. A better preparedness is found in the community that have no access to formal flood protection while less preparedness found in the community that perceived that preparedness is the responsibility of government. To conclude, we recommend the need to consider multilevel learning process in order to optimize building resilience.