A Resilient Building Certification Program

From the very beginning the Community and Regional Resilience Institute has been progressing toward a way for communities to be certified as resilient. That is one of the most significant reasons to establish a sound intellectual construct in the “Common Framework for Community Resilience” that will lay the foundations for an eventual certification program. Because of this, we are always interested in programs that will look at aspects of community resilience certification.

At a recent meeting in Atlanta, an expert panel consisting of representatives from government, academia, insurance, non-profit organizations, and designers, came together to address aspects of what a resilient building certification program should entail. The meeting was hosted by the Resilient Home Program, a partnership between Clemson University, North Carolina State University (NC State), Savannah River National Laboratory and the US Army Corp of Engineers - Construction Engineering Research Lab and funded by the Southeast Region Research Initiative (SERRI).

The meeting was part of the ongoing efforts of the Resilient Home Program, which was established to determine the way in which home owners prepare for, and recover from, natural disasters; to find ways to make new and existing homes more resilient; to educate the public on home resiliency; and to encourage homeowners to take steps to make their homes more resilient.

The program spent twelve months completing a gap analysis on homeowners' preparation and recovery from natural disasters. The analysis involved surveying the stakeholder groups- including builders, homeowners, engineers, government officials, insurers, researchers, architects and organizations involved in disaster response and planning - to better understand their needs.

The gap analysis brought to light four major areas that need to be addressed immediately, according to stakeholders. These areas include the effects of catastrophic mold and materials resistant to it, incentives for building homes more resiliently, the benefits of retrofitting for disaster and additional outreach aimed at target audiences.

Anyone wishing to participate in discussions about a resilient home certification program should contact the program through its Web site at http://home.resilientus.org.

National Thinking About Community Resilience Must Evolve

As we move from an almost completely protection centric view of homeland security to one acknowledging the requirement for a broader paradigm that includes protection, prevention, response and recovery, it is a significantly positive step that the concept of community resilience seems to have forced its way into the new doctrine. Community resilience is at least now a subject of conversation. Unfortunately, the national view of communities and where they fit in the homeland security enterprise remains quite shallow and does not recognize the full potential of community resilience to be the foundation of a resilient nation.

National leader speeches as well as federal web sites and publications now include words on resilient communities in almost every discussion of national needs. But the words always focus on individuals and families very occasionally going further to acknowledge organizations and the private business sector. Communities are certainly about families and individuals. But they are far more than that. Communities are the foundations of our civil society – where individuals live, work, play, raise families and derive their values. Communities are complexes of built and social infrastructure. Most of the built infrastructure is privately owned and operated. Much of the social infrastructure resides in organizations independent of governmental structures. Communities create the wealth of the nation in their small businesses, retail outlets, housing markets and individual investments. Communities educate the nation, care for the nation’s physical and mental health and provide opportunities for faith and spirituality. And communities are inherently resilient.

Nationally, we need to understand and capture that complexity in our thinking about, planning for and encouragement of community resilience. Resilient communities must be the foundation of a national disaster resilience culture.

Disaster resilient communities would have the goal of rapidly returning to normal functioning after a disaster. They would do so using the full resilience continuum of prevent, protect, respond and recover appropriately within the community context. A nation of disaster resilient communities would meet this goal by working to protect, prevent and mitigate appropriate systems with a focus on eventual full recovery. They coordinate response to rapidly achieve recovery of normal community function and capacity and ensure that recovery is rapid, equitable, and leaves the community at least as strong as it was prior to the disaster.

Disaster resilient communities will have realistic expectations of outside assistance following a disaster based on comprehensive vulnerability and capability self-assessments and community developed plans and processes across the full resilience continuum. Nationally, federal systems must help nurture communities in developing resilience; help train them in concepts, tools, practices which develop, support, and enhance disaster resilience, and work with communities and regions in exercising their resilient characteristics. In return, resilient communities enhance the power of national programs by inculcating realistic expectations and by applying local power in an effective and efficient way.

Communities are the powerful, complex, resilient foundations of a resilient nation.

Community Resilience: Ready for the Holidays

Every blog needs a holiday edition. This is mine.

In a workshop last week, someone – I don’t really remember who – stated that the holiday season in general is a great time for families to prepare for disasters. That sounds a bit strange but actually makes good sense. DHS and FEMA through Ready.gov have been continuously pressing families to “get a kit, make a plan and be informed.” The idea expressed at the workshop was that families are together more in the holiday season than they are likely to be any other time in the year. Why not spend a little time this holiday season using this family time to do something really important. Everyone from over-excited children to bored teenagers to grumpy adults can benefit from this family bonding experience.

The FEMA web site even has a page that outlines holiday gifts that increase preparedness. OK, so maybe they are not as great a gift as a pony or a play station, but they could make great supplemental stocking fillers. The site, http://www.fema.gov/news/newsrelease.fema?id=50059, lists gift ideas from weather radios to fire extinguishers. Check it out.

Resilient communities engage all their citizens and prepare across the full spectrum from individuals and families to governments, organizations and businesses. Here is a small way we can all help our community become more resilient this holiday season.

Season’s Greetings!

Community Resilience: The Third Roundtable

The Community and Regional Resilience Institute conducted its third invitational Community Resilience Roundtable in Washington on December 1. The purpose of these roundtables has been to assemble a diverse group of resilience stakeholders, let them know what CARRI is doing, obtain their feedback and solicit their advice. This year’s group, by far the most senior and diverse assemblage to date, provided excellent counsel and guidance as CARRI presented an early draft of its work, “Toward a Common Framework for Community Resilience.” CARRI intends that the common framework described in this document will be the starting point for a broader development process that includes practitioners, researchers and a wide variety of other stakeholders.

A “common framework” would provide the nation and its communities with a widely accepted, coherent, measurable way of understanding community resilience and applying that understanding to the community in a meaningful way. In this context, a “framework” is an intellectual construct that is coherent (its parts fit together) and complete (considers the entire subject). A framework for community resilience should assist the community by helping it to discover how the interdependencies within and outside the community impact its resilience in a systematic and consistent manner. The framework should also help the community identify external resources that will aid in recovery and redevelopment after a disaster and provide guidance for pre-crisis investments.

The early draft of CARRI’s “Toward a Common Framework for Community Resilience” has been through an initial review by CARRI’s national research advisor team and their recommendations as well as the outstanding comments from last week’s CARRI Roundtable are currently being incorporated. The resulting revision will be circulated to a wider audience of reviewers and then serve as the starting point for a national dialogue on community resilience.

Those wishing to participate in this second review should contact the Community and Regional Resilience Institute at info@resilientus.org.

Community Resilience: Long-Term Recovery

FEMA has formed a working group to examine policies and practices for disaster recovery. The effort is welcome and long overdue. As a part of the input to the working group, there is an invitation to the public at large to comment by providing answers to a series of questions. (I have noted in the past that current FEMA leadership seems to be committed to listening. This is another welcome indication.) Thoughtful answers to FEMA’s recovery questions from across America will be helpful in shaping good recovery policies and programs.

A fundamental question is how to define a successful disaster recovery. CARRI believes that successful disaster recovery begins well before a disaster occurs with a deliberate and well thought out plan to achieve community recovery. Successful disaster recovery addresses all domains of community life – economic, social, ecological and physical systems – meeting the needs of the full fabric of the community in a sustainable and inclusive manner. While speed of recovery is important, thoughtful consideration to reduce vulnerabilities for future events is also required. Successful recovery includes adaptation where weaknesses can be identified and corrected as part of the recovery process in order to make the community more resilient to future incidents. Over time, successful disaster recovery should increase community functionality above pre-disaster levels so that recovery after the next disaster is less costly and more rapid. The ideal process for community recovery facilitates and is in harmony with long-term community goals.

We believe that there are three primary characteristics that influence the speed and quality of successful recoveries. First, resilient communities have deliberate plans for recovery in the same way that they have deliberate disaster response and emergency management plans. They plan in detail how the community will achieve a rapid return to normal. Second, successful disaster recoveries involve the full fabric of the community in every phase of their approach to recovery: planning, preparedness, response, and short- and long-term recovery. Third, successful recoveries involve broad-based use of formal and informal (official and unofficial) communication networks to facilitate recovery processes and involvement. These networks are identified and rehearsed before the disaster and thereby extend the reach and impact of formal, official communications. They also include all parts and domains of the community. The informal, unofficial networks are incorporated into official, long-term recovery communication networks.

These systematic examinations by FEMA of federal policies and programs that will ultimately influence community resilience are very welcome. We should support them fully and thoughtfully.

A Few Stray Items

Just a couple of items of interest for today:

The DHS Summer Employment Program application period ends next week. Each summer the department offers summer employment in the form of paid internships to full-time or part-time college and university students. This is an outstanding opportunity for qualified students to gain on-the-job experience in a number of areas all of which are posted on the website at www.dhs.gov/xabout/careers. CARRI has hosted DHS interns for the past two summers and has found them to be bright, helpful, knowledgeable and a true benefit to our work. In fact, one of them chastised me this morning by e-mail for not having crafted a good CARRI vision statement. The application period ends November 27th so if you have a candidate, get them to the DHS web site as quickly as possible.

FEMA began a 30-day comment period on the National Flood Insurance Program on November 5, 2009. From several indications it is clear that FEMA is truly trying to listen. There have been a series of public “listening sessions” and FEMA continues to solicit comments via the web. These sessions which were by invitation included a wide spectrum of groups including but not limited to environmental and historic preservation groups, fair housing groups, and representatives from the lending, insurance, emergency management, real estate, land use, planning and engineering industries. To learn more about the NFIP and to provide input go to, www.fema.gov/business/nfip. It is your opportunity to comment and be included in the discussion.

National Resilience – Who is leading?

I spent most of last week in DC. Some of my time was consumed in trying to determine how the concept of resilience is progressing at the national level. There are lots of indicators that meaningful conversations are occurring and that resilience is taking root as a more comprehensive way to organize the nation’s thoughts on natural and man-made disasters. For instance, the National Security Council has an office of National Resilience Policy. Significant thought on national resilience seems to have gone into the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review and it may emerge as one of the goals of the Department of Homeland Security. Virtually every federal department and many federal agencies have included the word resilience in their solicitations for studies or in their seminars, industry events, workshops and conferences.


While all of this is positive, I sense a void – a wide disparity in what is meant by resilience. We lack a thought leader or perhaps a number of thought leaders for national resilience. CARRI has spent the last two years working hard to figure out what resilience means in America’s communities and we think we have made significant progress. But if resilient communities can help build a resilient nation, someone needs to begin to organize resilience thought from a national perspective. And while studies in this area will be extremely helpful, we can’t wait a couple of years to determine a pathway.


CARRI will continue to do what we have been doing – trying to sort through the extremely complex issues of resilience in the nation’s communities. We are ready to help at the national level by convening and mobilizing the community effort and working to link it to national thought and national policy. It is interesting that foreign policy can claim a number of thought leaders in academia and in think tanks but domestic policy has very few and resilience has, as yet, no champion. CARRI is looking for partners at the national level.

Community Resilience - An Old Dilemma: Resilience vs. Sustainability

The CARRI colleagues have broached the subject of resilience and its relationship to sustainability several times in the past without achieving any significant consensus. The subject surfaced again a few weeks ago and generated a several day exchange over e-mail. The spark for this exchange was an article in the Charleston, South Carolina Post and Courier reporting that the city of Charleston had just hired a Director of Sustainability, the only new position hired by the city this year.

A lively exchange ensued and on reviewing it, I think it is worthwhile to open the subject in this blog. One of the first thoughts on the relationship between the two terms came from Ann Olsen in Nashville. Ann wrote:

“My own thinking is that how the two connect depends on the breadth of the sustainability vision. When sustainability is conceived very broadly, then it seems to me that resilience may be (a) component of sustainability and enhancements to resilience support sustainability. In essence, resilience is all about sustainability through/beyond disaster. If we drew a Venn diagram, the circle of resilience would fall within the circle of sustainability. In reality, though, most folks looking at sustainability are not much thinking about how to sustain through/beyond disaster, and how to develop this capability, so this leaves resilience an undervalued aspect of the broader concept of sustainability. When the focus is more narrow, e.g., primarily environmental, then perhaps the two simply overlap.”

I believe that this subject of resilience and its relationship to sustainability (or vice versa) is one worthy of discussion. Let me know what you think and if the CARRI colleagues don’t jump in with their comments, I’ll post a few more of the e-mail exchanges later.

Community Resilience: More Thoughts on What a Community Is

After three weeks bumming around Central Asia, I return to find that the blog has been kept alive through the efforts of my colleagues John Plodinec and Andy Felts. Thank you.

As a follow up to Andy Felts’ October 6 thoughts on what a community is, here is an additional perspective from the CARRI Research Director, Tom Wilbanks. It is extracted from a soon-to-be published CARRI Research Report that summarizes what we know about scale and community resilience.

"The term ‘community’ means different things to different people. To some, a stable, cohesive, socially-interrelated neighborhood is a community. To some, a place of worship is a community. To some, a place of employment can be a community. At the same time, ‘community’ is often used as a social equivalent of a city or town, which is obviously a collection of communities that in some cases may share little more than physical proximity.

"Other uses of the concept are even broader. In this mobile world, connected by modern transportation systems and information technologies, communities can develop that have a strong self-identification but are networks of connections rather than pieces of a mosaic (Wilbanks, 2003). One well-known figure in climate change impact research observed: ‘If I were to die tomorrow, 15 people in my local community would come to my funeral, but 200 people from my professional community worldwide would send a message to my wife.’

"How community size relates to its sustainability is an interesting issue. For instance, a larger size means access to a wider range of resources, but a smaller size means simpler decision-making processes, which can translate into greater agility."

Communities and Pandemics

The following is offered by Dr. John Plodinec, Associate Director for Community Resilience Certification at CARRI.

Over the past few weeks, a CARRI team has been examining the impacts of pandemics on communities, and how to reduce them. The objective has been to identify actions communities should take before they are crippled by a pandemic to reduce impacts or speed recovery. While there is a tremendous amount of guidance available for specific sectors of a community (e.g., health care); there is very little aimed at the community as a whole.

The high rate of infection associated with a pandemic makes loss of human resources the most important direct impact. This results in a wide variety of indirect impacts – deaths, absenteeism, increased stress on those still working, a generally fearful population, and a variety of cascading effects. Both official and personal constraints on travel may limit the spread of disease but may exacerbate economic impacts.

In keeping with CARRI’s overarching goal to be relevant to any community, the impacts on different kinds of communities (large / small, urban / rural) were considered. While the effort is not yet complete, some interesting policy questions are being raised.

• Who should be immunized first, if the supply of vaccines is limited? While health care workers clearly should be among the first, it appears that there are both moral and practical reasons to also include some of those providing essential services, such as maintaining a community’s water and energy systems or guarding its prisons.
• Should special assistance be available for farmers? If a pandemic hits during either planting or harvest seasons, farmers could lose an entire crop. The resulting cascading impacts through a rural community would be devastating.
• Should private contractors responsible for providing essential community services (e.g., solid waste collection and disposal) be contractually required to have approved plans to continue operations in the face of a pandemic? Without such a requirement, a private contractor might be willing to pay a penalty for not providing service during a pandemic rather than try to maintain operations.
• What special actions should be taken to limit the impacts of a pandemic on prisons? Our nation's prisons are overcrowded, making them ideal candidates for contagion. The lack of trust between inmates and prison staff could easily slip into chaos if either the inmates panicked, or reduced staff led to loss of control.

The group expects to complete its effort next month.

Social and Professional Networking: Does it affect a community’s resilience?

The following is offered by Dr. Andy Felts, CARRI Research Associate and Director of the Joseph P. Riley, Jr. Institute for Urban Affairs and Policy Studies, College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina.

In the previous blog, John Plodinec gives a good definition of ‘community’ that reflects CARRI’s goal of promoting resilience. A community is a group bound by geography and perceived self-interest that carry out common functions.

While this has worked to keep the CARRI Team focused on a common goal, it is worthwhile to point out that it has raised a number of questions relating back to resilience for us as well.

One important question is whether or not new forms of social (and perhaps even professional) networking have an effect on a community’s resilience. While we have long had two-way forms of networking via telecommunication, it is undeniable that an explosion has occurred in the last few years. Text-messaging, instant messaging and Internet chat rooms now create virtual communities that are not constrained by geography. Voice over Internet, accompanied by cameras, now allows visual and voice communication halfway around the world for less than it used to cost to dial an adjacent area code. As these have consumed our time (and resources), do they have a negative, positive, or no effect at all on the building of social capital that once was done through more geographically specific ways such as interacting with others in our neighborhoods, clubs, churches and the workplace? Social capital is an important concept since it refers to the social cohesion that a community needs to carry out its common functions.

What about telecommuting? There are lots of good things to be said about it, including eliminating long hours for some that would be spent alone in a car. But the workplace also was once where ‘bridging social capital’ was created; that is, interaction between socially different groups. As people telecommute, do they lose a common community vision that may have been supported by workplace, face-to-face interaction? Does this affect resilience?

Finally, another question is raised by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg with his advancing of the function a “third place” plays in community building. By that term, he referred to places other than home or work where people go to relax and feel a part of a community. A third place can be a café, bar, neighborhood basketball court, barber or beauty shop, etc. As these have become more geographically less proximate for many because of community design, is community resilience affected?

It is important to note that these are CARRI questions. As such, they demand more research that specifically links them to community resilience before more definitive answers can be given. It will be research worth undertaking.

What is a community?

The following is offered by Dr. John Plodinec, Associate Director for Community Resilience Certification at CARRI.

When we talk about community resilience, discussion usually gravitates to "What is resilience?" We all think we know what a community is, but we know we're not sure what resilience is. However, defining community may be almost as important as defining resilience. A useful definition that reflects what CARRI is all about is:

"A community is a group of individuals and organizations bound together by geography and perceived self-interest to efficiently carry out common functions needed by the group."

Defining community in this manner is worthwhile because it leads to a valuable corollary: communities collapse when the perception of self-interest withers. This goes far toward explaining why so many rural communities are under duress: their original reason for existence - often, the railroad - no longer is as important. Former members of many rural communities have come to the realization that the benefits of belonging to their rural community no longer match the investment required. And so they leave, placing additional strains on those left behind.

This definition also helps explain why some community partnerships succeed and some fail. Successful partnerships have to be founded on mutual perceived benefit. I won't partner with you if I don't expect to get back more than I invest in the partnership. Even for flourishing partnerships, the partnership is likely to founder if the cost-benefit balance changes for one of the partners.

Community Resilience: A Resilience Speech

Secretary Napolitano’s speech marking the end of a successful and highly publicized National Preparedness month hit just the right resilience note. While clearly stating that protection of the nation from terrorism remains job one, she then went on to spend most of her address talking about building a resilient nation. She recognized several volunteers who are active in their communities and mentioned numerous other examples of ways to build resilience at the community level. In all it was a very good speech, effectively and robustly delivered. The Secretary clearly indicated that she is serious about national resilience and intends to focus some of the department’s energy there.


It struck me, however, that the discussion of community resilience focused solely on the preparedness of individuals and the participation of community organizations. That, in my opinion, is not nearly enough. It takes the full fabric of the community working together to make a resilient community. That means local governments, local businesses, local associations, local organizations and individuals working in concert over a significant period of time using whatever resources they have available toward a well thought out plan. It’s a lot more than moms and dads and book clubs.


Now I know that the Secretary knows this. What I’d really like to know is that this idea of robust, full-fledged community resilience is penetrating the rest of her organization.

Community Resilience: A Successful National Preparedness Month

As we come to the end of National Preparedness Month, DHS has announced that Secretary Napolitano will deliver a major speech on national preparedness tomorrow, Tuesday, September 29 at 2pm eastern time. We at CARRI will be listening intently to hear what the Secretary says about resilience, particularly at the local level. The speech will be carried live at http://www.dhs.gov/. For those not able to watch the speech live, it will be posted at http://www.ready.gov/ and http://www.citizencorps.gov/. We heartily recommend that our followers listen to the Secretary. It may give all us a clue on where the Department is headed in the area of resilience.

Community Resilience: Informing Policy

As I may have stated earlier in this blog, one of the tensions in the Community and Regional Resilience Institute work from the very beginning has been between what I call “getting it right” and “getting it now.” By that I mean that it is critical for the nation that the solutions we adopt to increase our resilience work in practice because they are grounded in knowledge gained from research and from practical experience. That’s getting it right. But we also have to realize that the nation needs solutions now. The next hurricane or tornado or terrorist won’t wait until we get it exactly right.

I’m not sure that this tension is recognized at the national level. I don’t claim to have great insight into or knowledge of all that is going on nationally on the resilience front but from my limited view of current processes and deliberations two things seem apparent. First, there is limited interaction between those scholars and researchers who have studied the various aspects of resilience for years and the policy community that is seeking to frame policies and processes for a more resilient nation. Second, virtually every federal agency is embracing a fairly parochial view of resilience with very little understanding of what other agencies (often in the same department) are doing.

I have been told that the first observation is not surprising. It has taken 25 years for the scientific community to begin to influence and have an actual impact on policy surrounding climate change. It seems to me that we should be trying to accelerate this interaction in the current resilience discussion.

Separate acceptance of resilience as an agency goal without understanding other efforts is likely to produce multiple, overlapping, and conflicting programs that will confuse and frustrate our communities and citizens. Coordination at the federal level is absolutely required now.

Community Resilience and Personal Responsibility

In its recently released report, Personal Preparedness in America: Findings from the 2009 Citizen Corps National Survey, FEMA discovered that we as individuals are not as prepared for disaster as we should be. The report (www.citizencorps.gov/ready/2009findings.shtm) provides a detailed look into individual perceptions of disaster readiness and responsibilities as well as interesting evaluations of demographic and contextual insights. I don’t think that anyone should be very surprised by this report.

Since Hurricane Andrew (maybe Hugo), American expectations of outside assistance particularly federal assistance have grown steadily, rapidly and unrealistically. Perhaps most evident in Katrina, our citizens and our communities seem increasingly to believe that FEMA will be on site at almost any level of disaster within 48 hours and will fix the problem. This report reveals, for instance, that more than 60 percent of the respondents plan to rely on emergency responders in the first 72 hours following a disaster despite repeated warnings from governments at all levels to the contrary. As interestingly, even among those who deem themselves prepared for disaster, the survey finds that most do not have adequate family plans and lack even a basic understanding of their community’s plans.

This problem is only a failure of the federal government in that we continue to believe that we can craft national solutions to local problems. At its heart, this is an indication of community failure. Very few communities have coherent, highly coordinated, individual preparedness efforts with a common message across jurisdictions and well thought ways to transmit the message to the full fabric of their societies. I am sure that there are some. In fact I highlighted one in my posting of March 24, 2009, the “I’m Ready Campaign” in Shelby County, Tennessee. The FEMA report, however, says that our communities are not doing enough or are not doing it right.

I am a big advocate of FEMA’s Citizen Corps. The thousands of Citizen Corps councils across the nation are in exactly the right place to solve this challenge. Citizen Corps hasn’t had greater success because communities continue to rely on federal funding of the councils, an expectation which belies the very name of their mission “citizen” corps. No matter how hard we try, the nation will never provide the resources to fully support all the nation’s communities in this way -- nor should we. This is a local community problem. Federal funding of what should be local initiatives only continues to foster the belief that preparing communities to recover from disaster is a federal responsibility. Communities have an inherent responsibility to protect their citizens. They need to put the skin in the game to get individual preparedness right.

Where Does Mitigation Fit?

One of our CARRI blog followers in a comment to the August 18 blog expresses the thought that “mitigation” should be in his words, “included as a component of any Sustainable and Resilient Nation.” (See the comment to “Simultaneous or Sequential,” August 18, 2009) He goes on to give several examples of how actions to mitigate would beneficially contribute to limiting the effects of disasters.


The comments have caused me to think about how CARRI is handling the important area of mitigation to disaster. Clear actions to mitigate are important and must be part of any community's plan to reach a state approaching resilience. Much of the writing about mitigation in disaster management seems to group mitigation actions into two categories – structural (engineered interventions) and non-structural (planning, codes, restrictions, material usage). Mitigation seems, therefore, to deal primarily with the physical environment. While this is clearly critical, it is not sufficient by itself.


CARRI treats mitigation as part of the total resilience mindset – culture – ethos. As we look at our proposed emergency management continuum – prevent, protect, respond and recover – undergirded by preparation, mitigation falls in the “protect” area of the continuum. Mitigation is one of the ways we protect ourselves and our stuff from the effects of natural or man-made disasters.


Resilience, however, also recognizes two things that affect our thinking about mitigation. First, we will never be able to mitigate all effects. Something will be damaged and some things will be damaged severely despite our best efforts. We still need to bounce back from this damage. Second, resilience includes more actions than just those which address physical effects. Resilience in a community has social and economic aspects that are not typically considered when one is looking at mitigation actions. Perhaps using resilience as our basis of thought can help us to enlarge our perspective of mitigation to include more than how disasters affect the physical environment.

Resilience at the Top

The President’s weekly radio address on Saturday was dedicated to remembering the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. It is worth noting that he used the word resilience in his address and called for the nation to be more resilient. He stated, “As we rebuild and recover, we must also learn the lessons of Katrina so that our nation is more protected and resilient in the face of disaster.” The President went on to support a multi-hazards approach to national preparedness giving examples in the natural, medical and man-made disaster areas. As I have noted earlier, the concept of resilience as a national goal seems to be gaining traction at the national level. Clearly, a significant number of senior federal officials are beginning to incorporate resilience to many hazards into their strategic thinking. Getting the President firmly ensconced into a culture of national resilience has to be a top priority.

Simultaneous or Sequential?

In a series of meetings in Washington last week (hot and humid and not very many people in town other than tourists), I began to see just how much traction the concept of resilience is gaining. Perhaps as some would suggest, it is just the newest buzzword that will run its course in time. I don’t think so. Those that I spoke with both in government and in the private sector are all very serious about the idea of making a more resilient America and have invested a significant amount of their time and energy thinking about this important subject. They really want to see it succeed.

At the national level this is going to take time. If the goal is to have national resilience as a national priority, Homeland Security Presidential Directives will have to be rewritten. An interagency that focuses on resilience across the departments may have to be created. Speeches and public announcements will have to be coordinated. This is a serious and important issue and will have to be treated as such. Additionally, resilience must compete with other challenges facing the national government that seem much more urgent in the short term – H1N1, national health care policy, energy policy and climate change.

The question for us at the Community and Regional Resilience Institute is whether creating a way for communities to work toward resilience in a systematic, meaningful way must – or can afford to – wait on the national process. Can we work simultaneously and in parallel with the national effort? Of course, I think we can. We need to start this year while there is significant momentum to convene the nation-wide forum necessary to find our way to a common framework for community disaster resilience. As the national policy work matures the two processes can inform each other. Communities will provide their input to help shape national policy and national policy will provide appropriate federal guidance and strong support to the community efforts.

That’s the way it should work.

Preparedness and Resilience: Are they the Same?

A couple of weeks ago the US Chamber of Commerce convened an informal meeting of people who are actively involved in community resilience-related activities and initiatives at the local, state and federal levels. This resilience-related work is frequently couched in different terms – the most frequent being public/private partnerships – but all of it can be seen to further the ability of communities to withstand and recover from significant disruptions. The individuals present represented the private sector, research programs, government, trade associations and on-the-ground resilience projects. I was privileged to be invited to attend and participate.

One of the areas of agreement reached by this ad hoc group was that there is a critical need for the nation’s leadership to clearly establish resilience as an important national goal. Several, but not all, of the participants referred to this goal as creating a “culture of preparedness” thereby seeming to equate “preparedness” to “resilience.” In fact, at least one participant went so far as to declare that the idea of resilience was nothing new but was simply preparedness under a new title.

In an earlier Blog (June 27, 2009), I argued that preparedness is the necessary foundation upon which an expanded continuum of emergency management must rest and that one of the results of that expanded continuum (and maybe the most significant one) is resilience. One prepares to prevent, protect, respond and recover and success in executing the results of that preparation is evidenced by the resilience demonstrated during recovery. To me this seems to be different than simply equating preparedness with resilience.

Is this just a distinction without a difference or is it a discussion worth having?

Striking a Balance in Research

In cooperation with the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center of the University of Colorado, CARRI hosted the first Resilience Research Workshop on July 14. The day-long event brought together over 50 scholars and researchers who have worked in areas touching on resilience, published scholarly articles and papers on resilience issues and who are clearly thought leaders in this growing discipline of understanding resilience. Five panels covered a wide range of resilience topics ranging across the social, economic and physical aspects of the subject. A workshop report and several individual summary papers will be available on the CARRI web site very soon.

While it is clear that both the volume and quality of resilience research has grown significantly over the past few years, I came away with an impression that may deserve further thought and discussion.

Academic research is appropriately narrowly focused – some researchers concentrate on social resilience, some on economic resilience, and some on physical resilience. While most acknowledge the need for integration across the various domains, it seems to me that the integration is not as robust and productive as it might be – or perhaps as it will become as the discipline matures. I think that that integration of the social, economic and physical aspects of resilience is critical for practitioners to fully grasp the implications of resilience for their communities. This integration may also allow the research to be more useful to those in communities who struggle with the day to day problems of trying to find practical ways forward. Academic research that is too narrowly drawn and done without a view of how non-specialists will use the results will not be very helpful to the local mayor or business person who must make day to day resource decisions. Integrating work like that being done in the area of indicators of resilience by Susan Cutter (Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute, University of South Carolina) and Walter Peacock (Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center, Texas A&M University) seems to strike just the right balance between great academic research and potentially really useful information for communities.

Engaging the Full-Fabric of Communities

Not only must disaster resilience be the cornerstone of a new disaster management culture in the US, and not only must it be built on resilient communities and regions, but disaster resilience must also engage the “full fabric” of our society. While the efforts of governments (federal, state, local and tribal) are critical, they are not sufficient. True disaster resilience requires a complex collaboration of government at all levels with crucial private sector energies and assets. The private sector is not limited to the private business sector but also includes the non-governmental, volunteer, academic, non-profit, faith-based and associational organizations that make up our social fabric. All of these organizations are important to the resilience continuum – some are critical. The private business sector provides much of the nation’s critical infrastructure and must be integrated either voluntarily or through regulation. Each method of integration will have an accepted and welcomed place. The business sector will have an incentive to participate in resilience activities where they can be shown to prevent loss and ensure a degree of protection from business disruptions. Many large businesses already operate across the resilience continuum – preventing those things that seem preventable, protecting critical assets and information, responding to disruptions as required and getting their business back on line as quickly as possible. Because the best of them operate this way on a daily basis, the private business sector inherently understands disaster resilience. It is critical that the Department of Homeland Security continue its efforts to engage, involve, and embed all of these critical non-governmental elements into the full homeland security “enterprise.”

Empowering Resilient Communities

Just as “all disasters are local,” national disaster resilience can be best developed from the bottom up, starting with communities. Resilient communities must be the foundation of a national disaster resilience culture and another essential goal of a revitalized and effective Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Ultimately, it is a community’s responsibility to prepare for recovery. It must also be the community’s responsibility before an event to:

· understand specifically what constitutes recovery for that community;
· strategize and deliberately plan specific actions to achieve the recovery, and
· set expectations on how that recovery will be achieved and what the “new normal” will be following the disaster.

Disaster resilient communities would have the goal of rapidly returning to normal functioning after a disaster. They would do so using the full resilience continuum of prevent, protect, respond and recover appropriately within their context.

A nation of disaster resilient communities would meet this goal by working to protect, prevent and mitigate appropriate systems with a focus on eventual full recovery. They coordinate response to rapidly achieve recovery of normal community function and capacity and ensure that recovery is rapid, equitable, and leaves the community at least as strong as it was prior to the disaster.

Disaster resilient communities will have realistic expectations of outside assistance following a disaster based on comprehensive vulnerability and capability self-assessments and community developed plans and processes across the full resilience continuum.

Nationally, DHS must help nurture communities in developing their resilience; help train them in concepts, tools, practices which develop, support, and enhance disaster resilience, and work with communities and regions in exercising their resilient characteristics. In return, resilient communities enhance the power of national programs by inculcating realistic expectations and by applying local power in an effective and efficient way. This evolution harmonizes DHS’s roles and allows DHS to change from being solely a federal “control” agent (which it is sometimes seen as doing ineffectively) to become a facilitator of a rapid and effective return to normal community function (a role which will properly and successfully leverage the federal resources and might).

A number of surveys and studies reveal that the current federal hierarchical, response-centric approach has elevated the public’s expectations of federal responsibility and capability well beyond the nation’s needs —and the Federal government’s ability to deliver -- particularly in light of longer term trends such as the projected increased in climate variability. The nation would be better served to engage communities in a way that sets more realistic expectations and increases the incentives to become resilient at the local and regional level.

An Evolved Disaster Management Paradigm

The traditional emergency management construct (prepare, respond, recover, mitigate) has served the nation well for many years and current Presidential Directives, policy documents, the National Response Framework, NIMS and operational and implementing documents reflect the centrality of this paradigm – we train to it; we exercise it; we fund it -- we are prepared to respond. Underlying this paradigm is the inherent assumption that if we are prepared to respond quickly, efficiently, and effectively, recovery will naturally follow. This paradigm is further undergirded by the unspoken belief that responsibilities and efforts to prepare are “pushed” outwards from the emergency manager at the hub to the various “spokes” of the community. Authorities, responsibilities and resources are centralized and hierarchical.

The lessons and changes of the last decade, however, have led us to recognize the need for an expanded and potentially more powerful organizing principle for both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the larger “enterprise.” This expands and adapts the traditional emergency management construct from its emphasis on “preparing to respond” to a new paradigm which emphasizes “preparing to recover” -- not just recovering functional power and water supplies, for example, but full recovery of the normal rhythms, functions and capacities of everyday life. This modified paradigm adjusts the mission construct to a more complete continuum -- prevention, protection (including mitigation), response and recovery (both short and long-term) -- and more properly understands preparedness as a foundational necessity of every phase of the continuum. This paradigm envisions community disaster resilience as the outcome of applying this evolved and expanded continuum. Grounding DHS and the homeland security enterprise in this disaster resilience context will focus resources and actions on the appropriate outcome and provide an effective organizing construct, thus taking the first step toward a revitalized and effective department able to serve its mission and meet citizen expectations.

Two Brief Thoughts

When CARRI began its investigation into the status of resilience thinking, research and policy development, the idea of resilience was not a concept in good standing at the Department of Homeland Security or in the White House. While there was growing energy among outside groups around the concept of resilience as an alternative to protection (see CARRI’s May 5, 2009 blog posting), the discussions were very limited and frequently somewhat acrimonious. It seems clear, however, that the landscape is shifting rapidly. The President has announced that there will be an office within the Homeland Security Council for resilience. Secretary Napolitano speaks of making the federal government an “engaged facilitator of long-term community recovery.” The designee to be Undersecretary of Homeland Security for Science and Technology, Dr. Tara O’Toole has made community resilience one of her primary goals. Resilience appears to be not just a concept in good standing but is quickly becoming a focus of policy thought. I think this is good.

There is apparently some confusion about what CARRI means by a common framework for community resilience (see CARRI’s May 18, 2009 blog posting). This confusion is generating a healthy internal discussion. In an effort to broaden that discussion, I offer my first draft of a definition.

COMMON FRAMEWORK FOR COMMUNITY DISASTER RESILIENCE: a widely accepted, coherent, measurable, way of understanding community disaster resilience and applying that understanding to a community in a meaningful way. A common framework would include objective, measurable, commonly accepted indicators; a practical assessment methodology to fairly, transparently and accurately assess the ability to return to normal; and processes facilitated by validated tools that allow the results of the assessment to be translated into actions that increase a community’s resilience.



Comments welcome!

Fatigue and a New Normal

CARRI and the Center for Policy and Resilience of the University of Southern Mississippi, Gulf Park Campus hosted a “Ghosts of Katrina” workshop on June 5 and 6. The workshop brought together a number of scholars who are working on issues surrounding Hurricane Katrina and its impact on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi as well as community leaders, activists and volunteers. Results from that workshop will be published soon and available on the CARRI web site.

It was very interesting that of the many topics and issues discussed, two themes were constant in the research results and in the community discussions. One theme can be best described as “Katrina fatigue” and the other theme is a strong desire to know when the community recovery is over. “When will we know that we are back to normal?” Clearly the two ideas are strongly linked.

The Mississippi Gulf Coast was devastated by Katrina. The recovery while dramatic has been long, slow and difficult. The communities have demonstrated great resilience, are coming back robustly, have accomplished much and will be stronger communities in the end. But they are tired. As a result of that tiredness, they want to know when they can consider themselves out of the recovery period and back into normal community growth and development. It’s a reasonable question that is undoubtedly conflicted by legal, political and social considerations. The question manifests itself in a number of ways from low attendance at community recovery events to the results of the recent local municipal elections.

Community resilience is all about getting back to normal but for a devastated community, what is normal? The CARRI team has been talking lately about the “new normal” for a resilient community. One of our proposed principles for a community framework is that resilience is ultimately about achieving a “new normal” level of functionality. This idea recognizes that a community that has been severely affected by a major disruptive event will be changed forever. The “old normal” is gone replaced by a new reality. The new normal will be different – it may be worse but in a truly resilient community it may be significantly better. Defining the “new normal” before the disruptive event – creating a resilience vision – will allow a better understanding of when recovery is over and day-to-day life has resumed. It may also help with the fatigue problem.

These ideas seemed to resonate with the audience at the conference.

Community Trajectory

In a guest blog our colleague, Dr. Andy Felts in Charleston, South Carolina , writes:

One of the observations on community resilience that the CARRI team has agreed on relates to the ‘trajectory’ of a community before a disaster. By this, we mean, broadly, the direction a community is taking pre-disaster. Our working hypothesis is that the trajectory of a community will affect the speed of its recovery or whether it may recover at all.

A simple example will explain:

In terms of housing and construction, Hurricane Katrina could not have hit at a worse time during the two decades prior to 2005. The storm and post-disaster period coincided with the leveling off and major downturn of the housing finance (hence construction) market in the US. Financial institutions were reluctant to lend money to either developers or individuals seeking to rebuild. As a result, recovery in the Gulf has obviously been hampered. A downward trajectory makes recovery much more difficult.

In this case, the trajectory of the Gulf Coast communities affected by Katrina was part of a national trend and mostly beyond their control.

In other cases, the direction a community is taking may be more under its control.

Still using housing as the example:

A community that lacks affordable, workforce housing or has inadequate housing is on a downward trajectory and will have worse housing problems post-disaster. New Orleans may be a good example.

But it is not enough to consider a single dimension or factor. As we move toward developing an assessment tool, it is growing more evident to us that while it may be possible to characterize the overall trajectory of a community, it may be more helpful to see where they are heading with respect to a number of variables. It is possible that as a community works to improve its trajectory in one area, it may actually be degrading another. This is the great benefit of continuing to keep an eye on the mantra that recovery must involve the whole fabric and all sectors of the community.

Let’s stick with housing to illustrate:

Communities could work to provide affordable, workforce housing in remote areas and that helps that situation. However, the community also should examine the burden such development might place on the transportation and other parts of a community’s infrastructure. An upward trajectory for housing may be offset by a downturn in transportation.

A resilient community should strategize to be on upward trajectories along several dimensions. The likelihood of this happening is greatly improved through perspectives such as CARRI’s that emphasize interdependencies. Being aware of the potential trade-offs between different areas of community functioning can prevent a community from sub-optimizing in one sector at the expense of another. This, we believe, will be valuable information as the community plots a path forward toward improving its resilience.

All of this raises one important point. There are good reasons for adopting the CARRI perspective even if a disaster does not occur. It makes for a healthier community and better place to live.

Right or Now?

In numerous conversations lately, I sense that the new administration is struggling with a common problem as it searches for the way it will deal with the theme of resilience particularly in the area of public/private sector coordination and cooperation. The basic issue is one that we at CARRI have recognized and similarly struggled with since we began our resilience work. I usually describe it as, “get it right or get it now?”

Hurricane season will be here in just a few days. All of us want to be better prepared than we were last year with new systems, processes and collaborations in place. The reality of a fast approaching season of recurring, predictable natural disaster provides the imperative to do something visible now. The reality of our system of government is that we will not make productive, large-scale changes to our national systems before this season begins.

Resilience is a complex topic whether at the national, regional or community level. For our governments, it is a new way of looking at the old issues surrounding the response to natural disasters. While there are certainly things that can be done quickly based on lessons learned, we will not build a complete system of resilience quickly. Bringing together workshops of experts for a few days may advance our understanding of what needs to be done; they will not provide the answers necessary to fully inculcate resilience into our systems. Hastily organized and promulgated programs developed in isolation within the Washington beltway may demonstrate that our leaders understand the urgency of the issues; they will not quickly translate into accepted practice and meaningful progress at the local level – particularly if they are not funded.

But the issues are urgent. There is no time for the academic and policy communities to debate the absolute best way to reach national resilience until we reach absolute programmatic certainty. The best way to get resilience right is to get the resilience conversation started now – and then move it along quickly.

The current conversation is fragmented. It is fragmented by agencies in governments. It is fragmented between levels of government. It is fragmented between the public and private sectors. And it is fragmented among the private sectors. In our system of government the best progress is made fastest when we get everyone involved in the conversation and make everyone an owner of the solution. That is why CARRI has called for a federally supported, grass-roots, bottoms-up conversation to create a common framework for community resilience. Resilient communities make resilient regions and a resilient nation. We can do that now and by putting all the knowledge and creativity of the nation together, we can get it right.

Moving Toward a National Community Resilience Framework

There is no commonly accepted national framework for identifying resilient communities or for assisting communities to self-assess and then work toward a state of resilience in a methodical, systematic approach assisted by accepted tools and processes so as to reap the economic and social benefits of becoming resilient. Understanding what a common framework would entail and creating a solid starting point for a national discussion has been a goal of CARRI from its inception. Establishing such a common framework is best done, in partnership, at the local, grass-roots level and in a broad-based manner that is inclusive of all elements of the community fabric – governmental, private business, associational, non-profit and faith-based – rather than top-driven by the federal government.

In many communities and regions across the United States there are initiatives, policies, plans, and technologies under development at the local and regional level that are realistic, practical, and focused on community needs. These labors have been started by business groups, local or state government officials, research institutions, economic development associations or non-profits but have not yet been coordinated to achieve a broad-based, grass-roots driven, commonly accepted result. It is time to bring all these efforts together in a national effort to establish the framework that can guide communities as they work systematically to become more resilient.

CARRI strongly supports the establishment of a National Commission on Regional and Community Resilience composed of elected governors, elected mayors, appropriate representatives of national organizations and associations and representatives of private business to supervise the creation of common framework for community and regional resilience that meets the needs of our citizens, businesses and governments, and voluntary and faith-based organizations; provides an understanding of and agreed upon terminology for community and regional resilience; examines how communities and regions can collaborate to achieve and sustain cost-effective resilience; and recommends to governments at all levels policies that are required to foster resilient communities.

Building an Assessment Framework

From the beginning of CARRI, we have worked to combine the knowledge we have gained from prominent disaster researchers enlisted in the national research team assembled by Tom Wilbanks at Oak Ridge National Laboratory with that of the ‘on-the-ground’ research done in the Gulfport/Gulf Coast Area, the Memphis Urban Area, and the Charleston Low Country Area. The goal is to develop an assessment framework that any community can use to assess its resilience. The framework will combine a statistical snapshot of the community based on readily available data sources, with a self-assessment that provides a lens for the community to examine its assets at risk, its resources, and its planning, leadership and communication.

The national research team has provided valuable information as we work toward developing the assessment framework.

Craig Colten, from Louisiana State University, R.W. Cates, and S.B. Laska, from the University of New Orleans, overviewed the lessons from Hurricane Katrina that relate to disaster recovery and community resilience. Susan Cutter, from the University of South Carolina, provided valuable insights into how the concept of resilience can be understood from the perspective of hazards, disasters and emergency management—pointing out that research in these areas has always been done with an eye on practical policy. Lance Gunderson, from Emory University, researched how resilience, as it has been applied to ecological systems, can inform work on human communities. Betty Hearn Morrow, from Florida International University, examined how socially vulnerable populations are affected by policy decisions and the implications for community resilience. Susanne Moser examined how research on global climate change can inform our thinking about community resilience.

These researchers have all, from different perspectives, kept us aware of the existing bodies of research that can directly inform the CARRI concept of community resilience. Because these are researchers who have always had their eye on the policy implications of their work, I have not been surprised to find a great deal of resonance between their work and what we have heard from community leaders as they have raised issues and concerns about resilience. Certainly most everyone—disaster researchers and policy makers—have been mindful of what seemed to work and not work after Katrina. All have realized that the initial response was only part of the story and that the rest is still being written as recovery efforts continue. As we have talked to those involved in emergency management, they have come to understand that response is not recovery, but it is intimately connected to it. It is becoming understood that just as we are planning our responses to disasters, we also need to plan to our recovery. The interaction and connectedness between ecological and human community systems is recognized as a two-way street with respect to recovery. Certainly there is acceptance from the leaders that socially vulnerable population need consideration in a variety of ways in both emergency response and recovery and the reality of climate change has finally penetrated into local policy-making.

All of this work provides a backstop to the development of an assessment framework. Without it, we could not be successful.

Resiliency IS Protection

For at least two years there has been an ongoing debate on the emphasis that the Department of Homeland Security should place on resilience in lieu of a perceived prejudice for protection.

The juxtaposition of resiliency and protection as themes for the Department of Homeland Security misstates the issues – it is not either/or. A different way of looking at the problem is as a continuum of Prevent, Protect (to include Mitigate), Respond and Recover -- with preparedness as a theme underlying all of those tasks AND Resilience as the outcome. One needs to prepare to prevent, prepare to protect, prepare to respond and prepare to recover. Creating a capacity to address all of these areas in a coherent manner builds resilience in a system or in an organization. The Nation’s current challenge is to establish the full mission in one inclusive continuum that addresses national expectations and includes systems designed to achieve full recovery at the end of an event, preparedness for each segment of the continuum, and the inclusion of all relevant public and private actors in the processes.

Resilience is the goal of the continuum. We cannot prevent all occurrences, but we can prevent some, and we should focus on prevention where prevention is realistic – terrorism, flooding, pandemic and food borne illness, for instance. We cannot protect ourselves from all things, but we can focus on things that absolutely require high levels of protection – nuclear power plants, mass transportation assets, critical communications structures. While we will need to respond to failures in prevention and protection, we can focus recovery preparations on those events where we know that we will fail – hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, ice storms. True preparedness for recovery requires more than the current focus on short-term recovery of basic services and functions. It requires instead an adjustment of thinking which aims from the beginning at regaining the rhythms of life, commerce, and interactions which define the long term recovery of every community. We need to see and understand the linkages between the work done before the event along the resiliency continuum and the ability to recover fully and quickly after the event.

Achieving Resilience implies the systematic inclusion of the full fabric of society in the continuum of preparedness in order to secure a full recovery. While the efforts of governments (federal, state, local, tribal) are critical, they are not sufficient. The private business sector provides most of the Nation’s critical infrastructure and must be integrated either voluntarily or through regulation. Each method will have a place. The business sector will have an incentive to participate in resilience activities where they can be shown to prevent loss and ensure a degree of protection from business disruptions. Large businesses already operate across the continuum – preventing those things that seem preventable, protecting critical assets and information, responding to disruptions as required and getting their business back on line as quickly as possible. Because the best of them operate this way on a daily basis, the private business sector inherently “gets” resilience. On the other hand, they frequently see protection as a governmental responsibility that may come with regulation, restriction and demand for proprietary information.

In a wider sense, the private sector is not limited to the private business sector but also includes the non-governmental, volunteer, faith-based, academic and associational organizations that make up our social fabric. All of these organizations are important to the resilience continuum – some are critical. Very few of these entities view themselves as agents of “protection” and yet they bring tremendous resources to the response and recovery effort when prevention and protection fail. This part of the private sector is best engaged under the rubric of resilience. Their involvement in the preparation phase can magnify the potential for faster and more complete community-level response and recovery. In addition, they can play a critical role in building a culture of individual and family resilience. This is an often invisible element of critical infrastructure protection and recovery because without staff and employees capable of returning to work, no facility or sector can sustain itself during an incident or recover and return to full functionality.

Finally, a focus only on protection leads to a built in bias against a systems or network approach for dealing with critical infrastructure and therefore does not address inherent vulnerabilities associated with critical sectors. No sector exists in isolation and none can be fully protected from failure. Resilience implies a conceptual framework that encourages an understanding of critical interdependencies between sectors and acknowledges that failure in one critical sector always affects other sectors frequently cascading sufficiently to bring down the entire system. The resilience continuum looks across sectors to discover what part of the continuum is best applied to specific parts of the system – like robust private business protecting what can be protected, preventing where prevention is possible and preparing to respond and recover where these efforts fail.

CARRI is working to help reinforce the resilience continuum.

The CARRI Community Forum

On April 28, 2009, CARRI brought together its three partner communities for a one-day conference in Charleston, South Carolina focusing on five topics – Executive Leadership and Community Resilience; The Private Sector and Community Resilience; Enhancing Community Resilience through Coordination; Building Local Resilience Capacity; and Local Government Leading the Way. The goal of the conference was to bring together each partner community to share lessons learned and create a series of white papers in each area of focus. These papers are intended to showcase successful resilience strategies in the partner communities so that other communities across the country can apply them in their own planning and resiliency efforts.


The CARRI Research Director, Dr. Tom Wilbanks, provided a quick summary of his observations of the conference to a group of CARRI affiliated scholars from across the nation. I thought it would be useful to share Tom’s observations via this blog. In the next few weeks, I will share other observations from the forum.


Tom wrote: On April 28, … I attended a “CARRI Partner Community Forum” in Charleston, SC. In essence, this event represented a handoff of community resilience responsibilities from the CARRI community teams to local community leaders. It included four mayors (Charleston and North Charleston, Memphis/Shelby County, and Gulfport), three city administrators, and local people representing private sector roles, cross-institutional local coordination, and local capacity development outside traditional government, e.g., in NGOs and faith-based institutions.


We were there simply to listen to what the community representatives had to say about community resilience, both to learn from their perspectives and to compare them with what has been emerging from the research component. Here is a summary of the messages that we heard:


(1) Community resilience means all-hazards planning – and also links with other community issues, such as poverty. In order to sustain itself, resilience has to show that coordination offers value-added in daily operations, not just in the event of an emergency.


(2) A key step on the way to resilience is tracing out a host of interdependencies: what depends on what – infrastructures, resources, information, authorizations, etc., etc.


(3) Resilience means that, in a community, people who need to respond together in an emergency know each other ahead of time. From Mayor Wharton: “A community that prepares together is going to stay together when something happens.” In fact, the benefits from broader acquaintanceships in a community extend well beyond the immediate purpose of preparedness.


(4) Timely communication structures that bridge community diversity are critical: especially non-traditional structures as normal structures fail to operate during an emergency. NGOs and faith-based organizations are often adaptable gap-fillers if they are included in the resilient community network ahead of time.


(5) Communities can do a lot on their own, and in fact resilience means taking responsibility for one’s own future rather than accepting dependence on others; but resilience also means linking local resources with resources (and rules) beyond community boundaries (e.g., FEMA rules on what costs that will be reimbursed…).


(6) It is critically important to care about the lives of the responders and their families – which requires advance preparation because this can get lost in the pressure of immediate response situations.


(7) It is also critically important to know one’s own community in great detail, especially regarding special needs. Again, NGOs and FBOs can help with this, because they often work with the least advantaged among the population.


(8) A key to response and recovery is getting businesses and schools up and operating quickly. Mayor Warr got everybody’s attention with his story of assuring that Gulfport’s local Walmart, Home Depot, etc. were very quickly in a position to sell the materials and commodities needed for response and recovery –- which meant that the sales taxes from response purchases went back into the community itself rather than elsewhere.

Our feeling was that these lessons from community experience – being offered by community people who are not generally very familiar with the research literatures – are in fact very consistent with the messages coming out of our summaries of resilience-related research. This is encouraging on both ends of the process. Rather than being a situation where research needs to be used to correct mistaken community impressions, or where community experiences need to be used to correct misguided research, the substantial overlap between lessons from experience and lessons from research needs to be highlighted as a very welcome emergent finding from the CARRI adventure.

A Community Sense of Place

CARRI is a team. From the very beginning we have “borrowed boldly” from any team member willing to contribute to the point that today we have very little memory of who had what thoughts and suggestions in the development of our ideas and processes. You can get some idea of the breadth of these team members from our web site.


Blogging is normally not a team sport. The CARRI team has quite a lot to say, however, and this Blog is one more way to give them an opportunity to say it. Today’s thoughts come from Dr. Andy Felts of the College of Charleston.


Andy writes:


“My wound is geography.” So Pat Conroy has his protagonist, Tom Wingo, begin The Prince of Tides. Wingo/Conroy then goes on to describe the beauty that defines what is called the South Carolina “Lowcountry,” a land of vast salt marshes, streams and rivers that twist in labyrinthine patterns as they wend their way to the ocean. Even from Charleston’s peninsula, you can see what Wingo described as the “quiet nation of oysters exposed on the brown flats at the low watermark.” The beauty of this rare place has left its imprint on many people.


When I first began working with John Plodinec and Robin White [other CARRI teammates] and we started talking about the idea of community resilience, I invoked this sentence and described the attachment of people to this area as a sort of “stickiness.” It seems that Charlestonians are simply determined to stay here—come earthquake, high water or war.


In 1886, Charleston endured one of the largest earthquakes ever to strike east of the Mississippi. The city suffered extensive damage. More than 2,000 buildings collapsed or sustained serious damage, some severely. Property damage estimates show that as much as 25 percent of the total value of all property was wiped out in a few brief minutes. Richard Cotê in his book, City of Heroes, describes the remarkable events that ensued. There was no federal or state aid; Charlestonians had to rely on the beneficence of donors from outside. Yet, in less than two years, the Mayor declared they were no longer in need of help and even returned money to donors. By then, the city was well into the process of rebuilding and recovery.


Just a little more than 100 years later, in 1989 Hurricane Hugo hit with such fury that Tom Brokaw on the national evening news the next night declared that Charleston was “gone with the wind.” But it was not. Though Hugo is still in the top five most damaging storms, its wind did not blow Charlestonians away. Instead they “stuck,” rolled up their sleeves and went about the business of recovery. Within two years, the economy had returned to pre-Hugo levels.


In CARRI, this notion of “stickiness” might be more commonly understood as “Sense of Place” in describing what we think it takes to make a resilient community. I have been struck every time we have introduced this concept to an audience. As I gaze around the room, I invariably see heads nod in affirmation: “Yes, I understand that. Yes, we do have a sense of place.”


Charleston is not unique in this respect. Paeans have been written about the Oregon coast, the mountains of Wyoming, the plains of Oklahoma, the hills of East Tennessee and many, many more places in this vast and varied nation.


As our thinking about this concept has evolved, we have realized it is more than an attachment to geography that keeps people stuck. It is also buildings and public spaces. Charleston Mayor Joe Riley describes baseball stadiums as places where “memories are made.” As well, it is an attachment to neighbors and fellow citizens—a Sense of Community if you will, and a feeling of belonging.


While rebuilding infrastructure and restoring the economy are vital to any community’s recovery from a major disaster, that Sense of Place/Community, fuzzy though it may be, truly gets at the heart of recovery. CARRI is about saving people’s lives—helping them stay stuck.

Resilient Homes are Key to Resilient Communities

We believe that one of the most important things a community has to do to reestablish itself after a disaster (after saving lives and property to the greatest extent it can) is to get its people back to work. Productive enterprise, as much as any other activity of the community reestablishes the normal rhythms and fabric of the community. Getting all of the segments of the community back to work quickly begins to reconstitute the community’s economic base and prevents long term job loss because of population dislocation. A working community says “we’re back and we’re recovering.”

Key to getting back to work is having some place to live. A resilient community plans and prepares to get its people back into their homes as quickly as possible. People who get back into their own homes even under less than optimal conditions are much more ready to participate in the process of restarting the community.

A CARRI affiliate, The Resilient Home Program, is a coalition of the willing working to improve the life of homeowners following natural disasters. Combining the resources of the Savannah River National Laboratory, North Carolina State University, the US Army Corps of Engineers Construction Engineering Research Laboratory and Clemson University, the Resilient Home team is examining the complete spectrum of ways to get people back into their homes quickly following a disaster. These include: response – stabilizing the home and rendering it a safe interim shelter; rebuilding – rebuilding with available resources in a more durable manner than before the disaster; prevention – protecting the home from the short- and long-term effects of a disaster; and assessment – determining the extent of damage that occurred to the home in a quick and cost effective manner.

Getting people back into their homes is important. You can find more about the Resilient Home Program through a link on the CARRI web site, http://www.resilientus.org/.

Resilience Is A Growing Business

Resilience is a growing business. The number of researchers and centers studying resilience in one way or another has blossomed over the past two years. The number of federal agencies with resilience initiatives or divisions working in resilience policy grows daily. All of these are worthwhile efforts and will clearly help the nation focus on the important task of ensuring that we can better recover from significant disturbances to the fabric of our society no matter the scale or cause. The more we know as the result of evidence-based research and the more that we create policy and procedures for multi-disciplined, cross-sectional response and recovery, the better America will be able to protect itself from large scale disruptions.

Unfortunately, most of the research efforts remain largely uncoordinated. While the numerous conferences, workshops and symposia serve an important function for sharing information, they tend toward examining focused aspects of resilience and do not shed light on the overall state of resilience research nor do they identify research gaps and requirements in a way useful to government, academic, or scientific organizations seeking to sponsor work in resilience.

Similarly there is no federal interagency process for resilience. Nothing better demonstrates this than an examination of the various federal agency definitions of resilience and even the different ways the definitions are expressed and applied within a single agency. Agencies are developing resilience plans and applying resilience resources with no common policy framework to ensure that these resources and organizational efforts are effective.

There is evidence to suggest that this challenge is recognized. The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) recently organized Regional Consortium Coordinating Council (RCCC), an effort by the Office of Infrastructure Protection to bring together regional organizations that are attempting to work significant interdependency issues, is clearly a step in the right direction. Last year’s two-day symposium for researchers by the DHS, Science and Technology Directorate, University Programs Division attempted to survey the field of resilience research although there has been no identifiable follow-up to document either results or a coordinated way forward. The need for coordination remains.

CARRI intends to try to help with a very small part of the research challenge. Collaborating with other centers and institutes who work in this field, we will convene a day-long workshop for researchers in conjunction with the Annual Natural Hazards Workshop in Colorado this summer. We are excited that Director Kathleen Tierney and the staff of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder have graciously agreed to work with CARRI in convening this workshop. We are in the process now of working with a group of associates from other centers to define an agenda that will assist in surveying the current state of thinking about community resilience and identify significant research needs. I will provide more information in subsequent postings as the agenda develops.

I'm Ready Campaign, Shelby County, Tennessee

Occasionally the CARRI team finds something so exciting or so well done that we can’t wait to share it with others who are truly interested in making their communities more resilient. Last week, while visiting our Memphis/Shelby County, Tennessee partners we found something just that exciting and well done.

The Shelby County Mayors’ Collaborative Community-Wide Preparedness Initiative or “I’m Ready” Campaign is the best, most comprehensive and coordinated community campaign for individual and family readiness that we’ve seen anywhere. The initiative and campaign was a true partnership effort of the mayors of Shelby County and its local municipalities who enthusiastically came together to provide their community with a living program for disaster readiness. Funded and managed by the Assisi Foundation of Memphis, Inc., an amazing, local, non-profit organization, the campaign is a completely positive, non-threatening way to get all citizens truly involved in preparing for emergencies.

Beginning in 2007, the Assisi Foundation conducted focus group and telephonic surveys to determine what residents knew about emergency and disaster preparedness, what information they needed and how they wished to have the information communicated. (Imagine that – ask the community what they think they need and how they think the need should be met.) The results of the surveys indicated strongly that the community wanted a message that was proactive and provided a positive message; topical in that it served to prepare things like the family, home, school, automobile, and pets; had a local focus rather than a national identity; created a consistent “feel” across the entire county; was tied to seasonal opportunities; and had a highly targeted message. Listening carefully to what the community said, the mayors and Foundation then went to work to craft a program that was positive and didn’t contribute to “disaster fatigue;” was simple and took into account the varying education levels across the county; was versatile and offered a vehicle for encouraging all kinds of preparedness without favoring a particular emergency; and was a rallying cry that caused people to want to join in. Instead of saying “Get Ready” the mayors asked themselves how they could empower the community to say “I’m Ready.”

There is no way that I can adequately describe the coherence, simplicity, or power of this community program. You can see the results at www.readyshelby.org but to truly understand its potential, you should talk to those who put it together. Now here is the really great part – the mayors and Foundation are offering the program to any community that wants to use it -- for FREE. Take the program, the materials, the logos, the commercials and insert your own name. It’s a ready-made program – well thought out and ready to go now. (I think that it would be nice to credit the mayors for their idea. They worked hard on it. But they are giving it away and you can have it.)

Check it out and then contact the Assisi Foundation of Memphis at www.assisifoundation.org.

CARRI Lessons Learned Part 2

Here are other colleagues’ ideas on what we have learned in our early months of working with our partner communities.

Dr. John Plodinec, Senior Science Advisor at Savannah River National Laboratory and a critical part of the CARRI Charleston/Low Country Team has suggested these – I have paraphrased just a bit:

We have learned over and over again the importance of planning and practicing the plans. It is perhaps the best way to engage the "unofficial" sectors. It is also the only way that a community can learn - prior to a catastrophe - how to deal with the unexpected.

Although we may not yet be able to quantify it, leadership stands out as a key component to resilience. Without effective leadership, a community is just another city slouching towards Katrina, and waiting to be reborn.

Communication (in it broadest sense) also stands out as a key component of resilience. If communications only occur within stovepipes, the community's ability to deal with the unexpected is limited.

Perhaps the real promise of CARRI is that we can help communities understand themselves and thus begin to predict how far, how fast, and how well they will recover in the face of disaster. Certification if we are able to accomplish it will be the icing on the cake based on the success of the community’s actions.

Dr. Andy Felts, Director of the Joseph P. Riley Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Studies of the College of Charleston and another vital member of the Charleston/Low Country Team has suggested these lessons:

We have learned that there is widespread agreement that we have not used the Non-governmental Organizations (including faith-based organizations nearly enough in response and recovery -- they remain a much untapped resource).

A resilient community probably should not struggle to get back to what was defined as 'normal' before the disaster. The disaster presents opportunities for adaptation that should be capitalized upon. These should be thought through carefully since they may present some controversy or issues post-disaster. A shorter way of saying this is why do we keep rebuilding those houses in those flood plains?

Community resilience involves not just economic resources, but social ones as well. Many communities have demonstrated that strong social bonds (social capital) give them more resilience than many might expect.

It would be very interesting to hear ideas from outside of the CARRI team on what resilience lessons are being learned in communities.

CARRI Lessons Learned Part I

I asked my CARRI colleagues for their thoughts surrounding what the Community and Regional Resilience Institute has learned over the past 18 months from our research, our national research associates, our partner communities and our wider social network. The responses were very interesting and came as both “lessons learned” and as “resilience nuggets.” I would like to share some of them over the next several weeks. This first set comes from Dr. Tom Wilbanks, CARRI Research Director and Senior Corporate Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Tom’s summary:

Community resilience is far more than traditional emergency preparedness. It means clarifying what a community means and engaging the entire range of community members in considering how to protect those functions and values.

A key is catalyzing and facilitating processes by which communities understand themselves, their values and priorities, their resources and complementarities, and their intentions if they are faced with a disaster.

Community resilience starts with individual families, organizations, and neighborhoods. If they are not resilient, then the community is not resilient.

Resilience is a concept that can catalyze new kinds of community interaction – and action.

Keys to such interaction and action include sustained leadership and communication (both messages and mechanics).

The focus on resilience interaction and action should be on community improvement, not just community protection: prepare to recover better, not just respond.

Resilience is a continuing process, not just a condition to be attained at a particular time. In order to keep the process going, it must be imbedded in continuing institutional roles, missions, and networks – related both to local action and to local knowledge.

One key to this process is iterating the planning process through time, including practicing response plans and using the practices to identify needs to reduce vulnerabilities.

Both the private sector and non-governmental, non private-sector organizations have more profound roles to play in assuring and sustaining resilience than traditional emergency preparedness has realized.

Strengthening social bonds among the various parts of the community is one of the most important aspects of resilience.

Equally important is recognizing and taking full advantage of the strengths of all parts of the community, working together.

Such broadly participative, representative approaches to realizing community resilience are not theoretical pipedreams. They can be done in the real world, in real communities with real people, and if they are done right they can inspire considerable community cohesion and enthusiasm.

Pretty interesting stuff!

The CARRI Community Process

To be able to move toward resilience over the time required for success, a community must adopt a resilience process that can be sustained in the face of normal community dynamics – changing leadership, competing priorities and constrained resources to name but a few. Of the things that occupied the CARRI team’s attention over the first year, none was any more critical than the establishment of a CARRI community resilience process that could be tested in our partner communities. A simple process that could be easily followed by any community seemed required if the idea of a certification regime that is viable for a nationally applicable program was to be realistic.

In examining a number of possible processes, we decided that a community resilience process was most likely to be successful if it had as a foundation something that communities were familiar with or were already using. In the end we settled on the process depicted in the chart below as our starting point.

Any community that has used a visioning process to determine where it wants to be in the future or any community that has completed a basic vulnerability assessment like those required for various federal or state programs will be familiar with this process. What CARRI seeks to do is to add or modify this recognizable process to meet resilience needs. It will suffice here to mention just a couple of examples of those modifications.

Organizing in a manner that reflects the complete fabric of the community – government, private sector, non-governmental and faith based seems to us to be crucial. All community stakeholders have significant roles to play in community resilience and all must be included fully in the process. Building a compelling depiction of what the community will look like following a disaster or other severe disruption provides the overarching vision that will shape the goals so a vision box is included. Nothing is more important, however, than “community ownership” represented by the “formal community organization” box. Someone has to take charge of the process. That organization must be acceptable to the full community and must be able to strongly influence the community’s decision processes. The journey toward a resilient community will occur over time and in a dynamic environment. We see the establishment of a formal “owning” organization with the responsibility and the capacity to direct the effort as the first critical step in the certification process.

Defining Community Resilience

Resilience is a concept that has grown in importance to the nation as we have struggled with domestic security concerns in the aftermath of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. For CARRI it was important that we establish for ourselves and our partner communities what we meant when we talked about community resilience. As Dr. Bob Kates described the definition landscape in the recent CARRI panel before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, engineers talk of the capacity to absorb disturbance and return to a relatively stable prior state; ecologists talk about the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize into a system that still retains its identity, structure and functions; vulnerability scientists talk about responses, adaptation and adaptive capacity. CARRI’s working definition speaks to the social, economic and political needs of the community. Resilience for us is a community or region’s capability to anticipate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from significant multi-hazard threats with minimum damage to public safety and health, the economy, and national security. We will continue to examine and refine that definition in light of our ongoing research, practice and experience.

Likewise “community” is a term that required thought and definition to differentiate our focus from the myriad of types of possible communities. For our purposes, a community has as its basis a geographic description. It is a place defined by common bonds and linkages which often have an economic basis. CARRI does not attempt to define the boundaries of these communities although we find in urban areas that they frequently generally conform to the metropolitan statistical area of a city. The CARRI process accepts, however, that the best definer of a community is the community itself as it organizes itself for the resilience journey.