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.