By formulating the Whole Community Approach, FEMA has created a meaningful shift in the doctrine of national emergency response. FEMA has recognized according to Administrator Fugate that, “a government centric approach to emergency management will not be enough to meet the challenges posed by a catastrophic incident. That is why we must fully engage our entire societal capacity.” This movement from government as the focal point for meeting the nation’s challenges to the mobilization of American society to find new, innovative and much more collaborative ways to solve societal problems is a tremendous step forward for any federal agency. In the area of making resilience practical, FEMA is clearly in the lead.

FEMA has two critical roles in national emergency management. It is the responder of last resort. It brings the power of the federal government to situations where local, state and regional capabilities are not sufficient to meet the crisis. This is the way that the agency is most often viewed and the way it operates much of the time. But FEMA also has an equally critical role to facilitate, encourage, provide expert knowledge and set goals and standards for local and state emergency managers. The Whole Community Approach acknowledges that second role in a very helpful but non-intrusive way. . It does not prescribe, set unrealistic national goals or try to force its ideas into a single inflexible template. It does not provide funding that may not be sustainable and can never reach all communities. Instead it offers core principles, key themes and pathways around which communities may organize, assess, plan and take action to solve their own challenges. It exemplifies the ideal federal program – leveraging the power of the federal government to assist communities in identifying challenges, taking ownership and finding local solutions.

By itself, FEMA cannot foster truly resilient American communities. True resilience in communities encompasses all aspects of community life. Resilient American communities are resilient in their economy, their social capital and their various infrastructures. This standard of resilience is well beyond FEMA’s charter.

In the federal government, FEMA has taken the lead. It has taken the first practical steps to turn rhetoric into reality; to give the movement a real, useful shove forward. Other federal departments and agencies need to think about creating their own “ideal” federal programs.

For the few who are not familiar, Project Impact was a program created by FEMA Administrator James Lee Witt that began in 1997 with seven cities and grew to several hundred cities. It was cancelled in the early days of the Bush administration in an effort to save $25M. The program’s purpose according a FEMA spokesman was to “protect families, businesses and communities by reducing the impact of natural disasters.” It accomplished that goal by bringing together different levels of government and the private and non-profit sectors to work in close partnership to identify specific actions and programs for reducing risks and enhancing response and recovery. By almost every account, it was a very successful federal program.

Its flaw may have been just that – it was a successful federal program. FEMA provided the funding for each city. Cities received federal grants to implement Project Impact and grants to implement the projects it produced. There doesn’t seem to be an instance of a city adopting a Project Impact program that was not subsidized by FEMA. It was a great idea that was widely embraced and achieved substantive results but because it was wholly sustained by federal funding it was not resilient. It was subject to the vagaries of shifting politics and it could never be funded robustly enough to reach all US communities.

Does that mean that we should abandon the idea of bringing back Project Impact? No. But we need to acknowledge the flaw in the original model and find a way to meet the original goal in other ways. Federal resources to assist communities in becoming more disaster resilient are declining and will continue to decline for the foreseeable future. There is simply neither the political will nor the available funding to begin a new federally funded, community risk reduction program.

Much more importantly, a fully federally funded program is the wrong way to approach the problem. The Project Impact vision of bringing the full community together to collaborative solve challenges was exactly right. But by tying it to federal funding the program never become the community’s program. Cities acknowledged the power of the process but never internalized ownership. In almost all cases, when the funding went away, the program ended.

Like it or not, communities own the challenges. Communities must own the solutions. Federal encouragement, facilitation and indirect support of Project Impact-like programs in America’s communities are desperately needed. A new federally funded program is not.

Community resilience assessments can be powerful team building exercises. Rather than calling on outside specialists, the process relies on community-based practitioners with inside knowledge of how common services are provided to their community. The process brings the community members with the greatest stake in a service together to assess it objectively. These stakeholders from throughout the community include elected or appointed officials, business leaders, naturally emergent leaders and ordinary citizens. By assembling these assessment teams for each service, the community creates a dedicated, insightful, group of advocates that can assess present conditions, envision a future and consider positive, practical and innovative actions.

Rather than simply using the traditional process of examining the community’s infrastructure and processes for vulnerabilities and risks, a community-conducted resilience assessment seeks community developed answers to the questions, “Who are we?” and What are we?” in preparation for answering the question “Who and what do we want to be?” The assessment is holistic in examining the community services that all communities provide, evidence based in that it is grounded in measurable community data, but it is also inward looking in a way that allows the community to collectively understand what makes it unique. In addition to examining vulnerabilities and risks, a comprehensive assessment acknowledges that a resilient community has a strong sense of identity – the special qualities and characteristics that make it unique. When a crisis occurs a resilient community works quickly to restore the positive aspects of its identity. But a resilient community is also aware of the negative aspects of its identity and recognizes that crisis can provide opportunities to change. The community resilience assessment provides an opportunity for the community to gain knowledge of itself in both aspects of its identity.

Building robust, community-based assessment teams and focusing them on the uniqueness of their community creates the conditions for objective, participative analysis of community services and the systems that provide them. The groups look at capacity – how well the service meets the community’s needs. They identify critical assets – which components of the services are essential to meeting community requirements. They identify the critical assets at risk – which assets are most at risk to the threats that the community has identified as the most significant. Finally, the teams look for the recovery resources – those resources that can be mobilized in the event of a crisis identifying gaps and shortfalls that must be addressed in the action planning phase of resilience development.

Objective assessments are critical to the community resilience development process. The assessment process imaginatively constructed, however, can be powerful in ways that help encourage community cohesion and commonality of purpose. Bringing together groups of stakeholders, creating a common view of community identity, and collaboratively but objectively assessing the unique characteristics of a community creates a powerful step on the road to resilience.

The United States may be in or approaching one of those significant periods of change today. While the themes remain consistent with our past the debate seems now concentrated at the more extreme ends of the spectrum of positions. Beyond ideological advocacy, there appears to be very little interest in or movement toward finding a positive premise around which to organize the debate and give it coherence beyond platitudes and fixed dogma. Resilience, however, provides a powerful concept for organizing thought. It allows the nation to collectively discover practical solutions that avoid the extremes of ideological driven thought. Resilience pursues what works not what someone thinks ought to work.

Resilience when applied to civil society has great appeal. We are in a time when change seems almost overwhelming and disasters, natural and human induced, are evident in each day’s news. Life for many everyday people seems out of control. Resilience requires regaining a measure of authority over our lives, our families and our future. It requires everyday people and leaders at all levels to assess the present and plan for the future. Resilience breeds confidence that we can take action now, withstand adversity when it comes, and rebound quickly and completely.

Resilience has legitimate and practical appeal across a wide range of political philosophies. It requires more self-reliance, more realistic expectations of government, and more personal responsibility at the individual, family and community level. It also acknowledges a leadership place for governments at all levels, a need to address chronic stresses at the local, state and national levels and an equitable opportunity for every American to prosper. Resilience is a way to empower citizens making them the core of the solution rather than simply part of the problem. Empowering citizens, neighborhoods, communities and regions is a way of managing expectations and creating positive action in a time of limited resources. Resilience can be a powerful consensus builder; there are few who will come forward and declare themselves to be anti-resilient.

Just a few years ago, the word resilience was a term of art in the material, medical and ecological sciences. Now it has become so prevalent across a wide spectrum of disciplines that it may be in danger of losing all meaning. Rather than let such a powerful concept go to waste, it is time to make it the thought around which we organize the nation’s conversation about many things but certainly about the relationship between citizens and government.

From the beginning, we have planned to use a series of initial community pilots to validate, improve and complete the development of the CRS.  As we move forward with coding and building resources, we are also beginning the necessary discussions to identify and enlist these communities.  While we would like our set of communities to include the diversity that will allow us to understand how the system operates in a variety of settings – different sizes, different economies, different threats, and different geographies – the most important factor in pilot community selection is commitment.  To be successful, pilot communities must be able to bring together a dedicated core of community champions representing the full fabric of the community who will understand that this is not a short-term event and who will be able to lead the process to completion.  Several communities have reached out to us to begin discussions, usually through one or more “champions” within the community.  Those discussions are very important as they both reveal additional considerations that are important to the candidate communities and  allow us to set a realistic set of expectations for the communities as they begin the pilots.  We expect to complete these discussions by early summer and be actively engaged in building resilience with the selected communities by early fall. 

Documenting the Work and Crafting the Recommendations:

In addition to building the system and developing the pilot community plan, the CARRI CRSI team is working diligently to document the Community Resilience System Initiative process – the knowledge gained from numerous workshops, the hours of individual interviews, the subject matter expert contributions and the multiple surveys and “homework” assignments.  This final CRSI report, issued by the Steering Committee, will describe the CRSI participants’ view of a roadmap to community resilience.  The report will include an overview of the CRS, the collaborative thought process that led to its final form, and a thoughtful set of recommendations for enhancing community resilience development nationwide.  We will include a summary of the work of each CRSI working group as an appendix.  We hope that this report will serve not only as documentation of the CRSI effort but also as a substantive contribution to a continuing national discussion on building a resilient America. 

Finally:

The Community Resilience System becomes more complex, more robust and more powerful each day.  Much of that complexity, robustness and power comes from the very wide and deep set of supporting resources that will be linked to recommended community resilience actions.  Our challenge is to make this complexity transparent to the using community while retaining the power and robustness of the processes and the resources.  Our ability to accomplish that task has been greatly facilitated by the way many of you have come forward to identify and provide those resources.  We are truly grateful for your ideas, suggestions and contributions and we will continue to enhance the system based on your involvement through this development phase and well into the community pilots.  Keep the ideas coming.

A CARRI community would have assessed its vulnerabilities, catalogued its assets and determined which assets were most vulnerable, which could/should be restored first and identified the gaps for which outside resources would have to be requested well before the tornado. This would have been done by all parts of the community — individuals and families; local government; small and large employers.

A CARRI community would have a well planned and well rehearsed communications plan for getting information to all of its citizens based on a collaborative use of all the resources available to the community rather than just government.  The information provided by such a coordinated plan would be useful, relevant and trusted.

 A CARRI community would have well-established, trusted, community networks based on the full fabric of the community (government, private business, faith-based, associational) and those networks would have been proven through collaborative planning and continuous interactions before the catastrophic event.  The community would also have similar networks developed with other communities within its region.  The time to meet your neighbor (individual or community) is not post-disaster.

 A CARRI community would have a vision for a post-disaster community and a plan based on that vision.  The vision would be accepted by the community as a basis for action.  Because time is critical post-event, this vision and plan would help the community rapidly recover in a manner consistent with their long-term vision, goals and interests.

 After a year’s work by over 175 people representing the research world, the full spectrum of America’s communities and significant representatives from the private business sector, our developers are coding the software for the Community Resilience System (CRS) that we have envisioned from the beginning of this project.  Our challenge continues to be ensuring that the resulting system is highly flexible, simple, easy to use, and has robust embedded supporting resources.  The joint Community and Regional Resilience Institute (CARRI) and Meridian Institute team supervising the software engineers works daily to create a web-enabled product that has an attractive and user friendly portal for client interface while testing each step for logic and adherence to the principle that the tool must be useful to the community’s experts without outside assistance.  This entire process is overseen by the Community Resilience System Initiative (CRSI) Steering Committee which continues to actively guide and direct the entire project. 

Building the Resource Base: 

The Community Resilience System is designed to allow communities to work systematically through a number of recommended or required actions tailored to the community’s needs that culminate in an actionable plan to increase resilience.  One of the most powerful attributes of the system is the inclusion of robust sets of supporting resources that accompany each recommended action.  The supporting resources are varied and specifically designed to support the action with which they are associated.  They may take the form of checklists, templates, examples of successful practices, guidance material or data sources.  Each action has several pertinent supporting resources. 

The CARRI team is working hard now to complete the compilation of those resources.  For all actions, we want to find the best resources available to meet the specific need.  In most cases, we have been able to find one or more existing resources that can be used to meet the action requirements.    In no case do we wish to re-invent or duplicate an existing, proven resource with anything original and untested.  In this way, the CRS acts as a robust vehicle to expand the reach of existing private sector and government programs.  Where resources do not exist or additional guidance or instructions are needed, the team is creating these resources to be tested early in the community pilot process. 

More about the pilots and CRSI report to come…

Led by an energetic Daniel Homsey from city hall, this city government sponsored program includes a dynamic set of strategic partnerships among government agencies, non-profits and community organizations, a NEN University to engage the academic community, an awards program, a storytelling arm and robust use of all social media.  Its projects are organized and managed by the neighborhoods themselves, based on the core needs identified by the residents, and facilitated and encouraged by the city. 

You can find everything about the San Francisco Neighborhood Empowerment Network at www.empowersf.org.  The site is well worth your visit.

One of the things we at CARRI want to do is to highlight ways that communities are organizing themselves to become more resilient.  If you have a example, contact us and let’s get these great stories told.

This has been a team effort combining the work of over 175 participants – researchers from numerous disciplines and community leaders representing all aspects of community life drawn from across the nation.  We believe that we have developed a good, functional prototype – a system of processes and resources that any community can use to increase its resilience across a wide spectrum of disturbances.  But – and it is a big but – we won’t know if what we have cooperatively created has value until we get it in the hands of real communities and watch it operate.  For that, we need a group of pilot communities that will agree to work with CARRI and the CRS to help us understand what works, what doesn’t work, and what needs further development.

CARRI is in the process of actively recruiting 5 to 10 CRS Pilot Communities.  While we would like for this set of communities to include the diversity that will allow us to understand how the system operates in a variety of settings – different sizes, different economies, different threats, and different geographies – the most important factor in pilot community selection is commitment.  The communities that undertake this journey to resilience must have a dedicated core of committed leaders who understand that this is a lengthy trip – a long-term commitment to making their community different, better, more resilient.

The CARRI team, working through the Community Resilience System Initiative Steering Committee, has identified a number of potential pilot communities.  Other communities have come forward and indicated a desire to participate in the pilot program.  Between now and mid-summer, we will carefully work with each candidate community to ensure mutual understanding of the tasks, the pitfalls, and the rewards.  Simultaneously, we are working to identify the resources required to undertake these pilots and anticipating a full pilot community launch by the end of the summer.

We know that the system is neither as complete nor as robust as we hope that it will eventually become.  These pilots are designed both to test the system and allow conclusions about its usefulness, practicality, and effectiveness; they will also help us identify additional supporting resources and processes that will make the system more powerful.  In this sense, these pilots are both tests and creative development opportunities.

While we have identified several communities and have begun discussions we have made no final selections.  Communities who may be interested in becoming pilots should contact CARRI and let us know of your interest. 

We at CARRI, acting as the Community Resilience System Initiative Steering Committee’s representatives, are excited about the prospect of taking the work of so many dedicated initiative participants and watching it operate in US communities.  We think that these pioneer resilient communities will set an example and the standard for building a truly resilient America anchored in resilient American communities.

All three working groups that came together to assist us in this project – a group of researchers (the Subject Matter Group); a group of community representatives (the Community Leaders Group); and a group representing government and the private business sector (the Resilience Benefits Group) have completed their formal work, although we remain in constant contact with them and continue to benefit from their wisdom and experience.  In all, well over 200 individuals provided input, advice, ideas, and constructive criticism.  We have documented hundreds of hours of in-person workshops and telephonic listening interviews, numerous short surveys on specific topics and a significant amount of individually produced thoughts, ideas and suggestions in summary reports for each work group.  Each of these reports will be published on or about April 1 as annexes to the full project report of the CRSI Steering Committee.  The final Steering Committee report will also include a set of policy and other recommendations flowing from the working groups’ reports that bear on community resilience. 

We know that every community is a complex social organization with its own characteristics, needs, challenges and potential solutions.  The Community Resilience System  acknowledges this and provides a framework from which communities will be able to tailor their individual resilience vision, programs and action plans without being overly prescriptive.  It guides communities in how to think about resilience and provides a well conceived set of actions that will lead to community self-knowledge; to outcome driven actions; to an implementable, sustainable plan; and, we hope, to community improvement.

We are indebted to the scores of people who have shared their experience and wisdom to make the system possible.  We are keenly interested in any suggestions, connections and ideas our readers would care to share.