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.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
The CARRInstitute -- Components Defined
In order to take full advantage of the practice and research linkage and to move our effort to the next level, CARRI created the Community and Regional Resilience Institute in 2009. Establishment of this new Institute is an important step in furthering CARRI’s initial work in the Southeast and realizing the full potential of the expanding community practice and growing body of research. The new Institute has five divisions:
Community Resilience Practice
The Community Resilience Practice works directly with communities who desire to increase their resilience across all community domains using the CARRI process. In 2009 we will continue the community partnerships with our three original partner communities while reaching out to other regional partners and communities with tailored programs designed to launch them onto a resilience pathway. Additionally, CARRI will finalize a community implementation package that will provide the basic materials to enable a community to understand and take ownership of the CARRI process with ongoing Institute guidance and mentoring.
Community Resilience Research
Building on the research work already accomplished, the Community and Resilience Institute will become recognized in the area of resilience research as a center of community-based resilience study. We will act as a facilitator to promote linkages among the larger family of resilience centers in the nation in matters relating to communities. CARRI has had significant success in fully integrating its research efforts into the community practice as well as assembling an outstanding group of university, laboratory and independent scholars from across the US. The Institute will continue its publication of community-based research, academic papers and case studies to provide support to organizations and agencies working in the community resilience field. Additionally, we want to focus this year to identify the gaps in community resilience knowledge to be better able to provide advice on national research requirements. The Institute will also sponsor workshops and seminars to assemble those working in the area of community resilience and promote cooperation and collaboration on this nationally vital research area.
Community Resilience Certification
One of the basic ideas of CARRI from its beginning is that communities can benefit economically from resilience investments. We see community resilience certification as the means to that economic end. The community resilience certification division of the Institute will be charged with working with the widest possible set of stakeholders to fully develop a community resilience certification system that can address the complexity of community resilience in a real-world, practical manner that is widely accepted. This is clearly a challenging task but one that we see as critical to the success of the program and to creating many more resilient communities and ultimately a more resilient nation.
Community Resilience Policy
The Community and Regional Resilience Institute will be available to policy makers at the national, state and local level as a resource to inform policy. The knowledge gained from the community resilience practice and the research efforts provide practical information for policy makers that is grounded in community reality and bolstered by academic study. Through the publication of papers and by hosting and participating in workshops and seminars, CARRI will assist leaders at all levels as they work to make our nation’s communities more resilient.
Community Resilience Resources Repository
CARRI will continue to provide resources for those researchers who wish to work in the area of community resilience and to those communities that wish to become more resilient. Over the past year, CARRI published several research papers outlining the state of community resilience knowledge today. CARRI also has created a searchable resilience publications database and provides this service (updated quarterly) to researchers via its CARRI web site, http://www.resilientus.org/. In the coming months, the Institute will expand this repository to include additional research papers, lessons learned from our partner communities and community resilience case studies.
The leap from initiative to institute is a big one but one that we have been encouraged by many of our supporters to make as early as possible. Your comments and ideas will help us ensure success.
Community Resilience Practice
The Community Resilience Practice works directly with communities who desire to increase their resilience across all community domains using the CARRI process. In 2009 we will continue the community partnerships with our three original partner communities while reaching out to other regional partners and communities with tailored programs designed to launch them onto a resilience pathway. Additionally, CARRI will finalize a community implementation package that will provide the basic materials to enable a community to understand and take ownership of the CARRI process with ongoing Institute guidance and mentoring.
Community Resilience Research
Building on the research work already accomplished, the Community and Resilience Institute will become recognized in the area of resilience research as a center of community-based resilience study. We will act as a facilitator to promote linkages among the larger family of resilience centers in the nation in matters relating to communities. CARRI has had significant success in fully integrating its research efforts into the community practice as well as assembling an outstanding group of university, laboratory and independent scholars from across the US. The Institute will continue its publication of community-based research, academic papers and case studies to provide support to organizations and agencies working in the community resilience field. Additionally, we want to focus this year to identify the gaps in community resilience knowledge to be better able to provide advice on national research requirements. The Institute will also sponsor workshops and seminars to assemble those working in the area of community resilience and promote cooperation and collaboration on this nationally vital research area.
Community Resilience Certification
One of the basic ideas of CARRI from its beginning is that communities can benefit economically from resilience investments. We see community resilience certification as the means to that economic end. The community resilience certification division of the Institute will be charged with working with the widest possible set of stakeholders to fully develop a community resilience certification system that can address the complexity of community resilience in a real-world, practical manner that is widely accepted. This is clearly a challenging task but one that we see as critical to the success of the program and to creating many more resilient communities and ultimately a more resilient nation.
Community Resilience Policy
The Community and Regional Resilience Institute will be available to policy makers at the national, state and local level as a resource to inform policy. The knowledge gained from the community resilience practice and the research efforts provide practical information for policy makers that is grounded in community reality and bolstered by academic study. Through the publication of papers and by hosting and participating in workshops and seminars, CARRI will assist leaders at all levels as they work to make our nation’s communities more resilient.
Community Resilience Resources Repository
CARRI will continue to provide resources for those researchers who wish to work in the area of community resilience and to those communities that wish to become more resilient. Over the past year, CARRI published several research papers outlining the state of community resilience knowledge today. CARRI also has created a searchable resilience publications database and provides this service (updated quarterly) to researchers via its CARRI web site, http://www.resilientus.org/. In the coming months, the Institute will expand this repository to include additional research papers, lessons learned from our partner communities and community resilience case studies.
The leap from initiative to institute is a big one but one that we have been encouraged by many of our supporters to make as early as possible. Your comments and ideas will help us ensure success.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Community and Regional Resilience Institute Blog -- Come Read and Learn about CARRI
Welcome to the Community and Regional Resilience Institute (CARRI) Blog. A new feature of the Institute, we hope that this site will serve two purposes – 1) to promote discussion among community practitioners and the Institute staff on ideas, practices and processes being developed to assist communities to become more resilient and 2) to enhance communication among other similarly focused centers. We welcome your ideas and your questions. We will provide answers where we can and assist you in finding answers where we need to learn with you.
For those not familiar with our Institute -- In early 2007 the Department of Homeland Security suggested the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) look at "resilience" as part of the congressionally mandated Southeast Region Research Initiative (SERRI). With some considerable doubt and uncertainty, we began a fairly comprehensive examination to determine what the term resilience meant in the context of homeland security.
Our initial investigations took the form of engaging a wide spectrum of individuals, organizations, and governmental entities. We talked to anyone with experience who would talk to us - over one hundred experts and practitioners from government, private industry, academia and non-governmental groups - about the state and direction of resiliency.
These wide ranging conversations led us to several tentative conclusions and to our current project, the Community and Regional Resilience Initiative (CARRI). We think we found that: 1) national policy is driven by protection; 2) there is a growing realization that a national policy of protection cannot possibly address the full array of threats the nation faces and will face in the future; 3) while the body of resilience study is growing, much of it involves understanding resilience as it applies to sectors; and 4) there is no comprehensive effort to apply resilience knowledge in a holistic way to the operational level of our society - communities where we all work and live.
All of this suggested to us that ORNL and its partners at Savannah River National Laboratory and in our partner universities could best contribute to the growing resiliency effort by concentrating on community resilience, eventually linking communities to regions and regions to the nation.
We took as our basis a simple economic rationale: communities have a quantifiable level of functional capacity. In situation of acute disruption such as a natural or man-made disaster that capacity declines at a rate and to a depth that is largely dependent on the nature of the disruption, the community's level of preparedness for that specific disruption, and the rapidity and effectiveness of that response. More importantly, the recovery rate from the disruption largely depends on those same factors.
As the scope of the project began to take shape, there was a growing realization that the necessary understanding about community interdependencies and interconnectedness could not happen in national laboratories or academic institutions alone. There clearly needed to be a strong, coordinating research component to the program but the real learning must come from working in, with and around communities.
The capabilities of resilience experts must be coupled with the everyday experience and understanding of people who face the challenges on a daily basis. Additionally, if this program is to have national implications, then the communities must allow us to study what is common and what is unique. We needed at least three communities that were economically, geographically and demographically diverse. We found our three willing communities in the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, the Charleston, South Carolina Tri-County Area and the Memphis, Tennessee Urban Area.
Based on that start, 2008 was a year of significant progress for CARRI – as our entire CARRI team – researchers located throughout the nation; local research teams from our three partner communities; CARRI community engagement teams; and, most importantly, our dedicated local partners.
Using input from the communities, lessons learned from around the nation, and the guidance of ORNL-convened researchers, CARRI has developed a community resilience framework that outlines both processes and tools that communities can use to become more resilient. As we move into the New Year, CARRI will also begin to demonstrate that resilient communities can gain economically from their resilience investments through our development of a new and innovative community resilience certification system that recognizes community processes and accomplishments in support of greater resilience.
From its beginning, CARRI has been designed to combine community engagement activities with research activities. Resilient communities are our objective and research is critical to ensure that CARRI’s understanding is based on knowledge and evidence and not just ad hoc ideas; for the sake of our communities and the best use of their limited resources, we want to be sure to get it right. CARRI’s interactive linkage between research and practice in the field is very rare. In a future blog, I will give more detail about how the Institute takes full advantage of this linkage.
For those not familiar with our Institute -- In early 2007 the Department of Homeland Security suggested the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) look at "resilience" as part of the congressionally mandated Southeast Region Research Initiative (SERRI). With some considerable doubt and uncertainty, we began a fairly comprehensive examination to determine what the term resilience meant in the context of homeland security.
Our initial investigations took the form of engaging a wide spectrum of individuals, organizations, and governmental entities. We talked to anyone with experience who would talk to us - over one hundred experts and practitioners from government, private industry, academia and non-governmental groups - about the state and direction of resiliency.
These wide ranging conversations led us to several tentative conclusions and to our current project, the Community and Regional Resilience Initiative (CARRI). We think we found that: 1) national policy is driven by protection; 2) there is a growing realization that a national policy of protection cannot possibly address the full array of threats the nation faces and will face in the future; 3) while the body of resilience study is growing, much of it involves understanding resilience as it applies to sectors; and 4) there is no comprehensive effort to apply resilience knowledge in a holistic way to the operational level of our society - communities where we all work and live.
All of this suggested to us that ORNL and its partners at Savannah River National Laboratory and in our partner universities could best contribute to the growing resiliency effort by concentrating on community resilience, eventually linking communities to regions and regions to the nation.
We took as our basis a simple economic rationale: communities have a quantifiable level of functional capacity. In situation of acute disruption such as a natural or man-made disaster that capacity declines at a rate and to a depth that is largely dependent on the nature of the disruption, the community's level of preparedness for that specific disruption, and the rapidity and effectiveness of that response. More importantly, the recovery rate from the disruption largely depends on those same factors.
As the scope of the project began to take shape, there was a growing realization that the necessary understanding about community interdependencies and interconnectedness could not happen in national laboratories or academic institutions alone. There clearly needed to be a strong, coordinating research component to the program but the real learning must come from working in, with and around communities.
The capabilities of resilience experts must be coupled with the everyday experience and understanding of people who face the challenges on a daily basis. Additionally, if this program is to have national implications, then the communities must allow us to study what is common and what is unique. We needed at least three communities that were economically, geographically and demographically diverse. We found our three willing communities in the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, the Charleston, South Carolina Tri-County Area and the Memphis, Tennessee Urban Area.
Based on that start, 2008 was a year of significant progress for CARRI – as our entire CARRI team – researchers located throughout the nation; local research teams from our three partner communities; CARRI community engagement teams; and, most importantly, our dedicated local partners.
Using input from the communities, lessons learned from around the nation, and the guidance of ORNL-convened researchers, CARRI has developed a community resilience framework that outlines both processes and tools that communities can use to become more resilient. As we move into the New Year, CARRI will also begin to demonstrate that resilient communities can gain economically from their resilience investments through our development of a new and innovative community resilience certification system that recognizes community processes and accomplishments in support of greater resilience.
From its beginning, CARRI has been designed to combine community engagement activities with research activities. Resilient communities are our objective and research is critical to ensure that CARRI’s understanding is based on knowledge and evidence and not just ad hoc ideas; for the sake of our communities and the best use of their limited resources, we want to be sure to get it right. CARRI’s interactive linkage between research and practice in the field is very rare. In a future blog, I will give more detail about how the Institute takes full advantage of this linkage.
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