Warren Edwards

San Francisco Neighborhood Empowerment Network

April 14th, 2011 - Warren Edwards  

One of the primary ways that governments at all echelons create resilience is to empower its citizens to take charge of their own lives and build a safe and secure future for themselves and their families.  The San Francisco Neighborhood Empowerment Network seeks to do just that.  The Neighborhood Empowerment Network, or NEN, is a coalition of residents, community, faith-based, academic institutions and government agencies whose goal is to empower neighborhoods to become cleaner, greener, healthier and more inclusive places to live and work.  To me this certainly exemplifies the CARRI idea of bringing together the “full fabric” of the community and greater resilience for a community with these goals seems highly probable. 

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.

Warren Edwards

Piloting the System

April 5th, 2011 - Warren Edwards  

Less than a year ago, CARRI set a goal of creating a practical, usable Community Resilience System (CRS) based on evidence gleaned from academic research and practical experience.  The software that will power that system is being written now.  We are on track to have a web-enabled prototype system ready to be tested by mid-summer.

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.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Very Hidden Infrastructure: Social Capital

March 28th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

Though I only moved to Charleston six weeks before Hurricane Hugo hit, the aftermath was remarkable in many ways. Despite the misery of no power, downed trees, blocked roads and widespread damage, many remember the first few days with a great deal of fondness. In my neighborhood, we had a few block parties. As people realized their freezer stocks were going to thaw, they drug out grills and gas stoves and cooked for their neighbors. Of course there was a sense of exhilaration that no one lost a loved one or was seriously injured. But the feeling of ‘togetherness’ persisted for some time and brings a smile even today.

In her book, “A Paradise Built in Hell,” Rebecca Solnit writes directly to this phenomenon through recorded chronicles and interviews around five major disasters—the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, the 1917 munitions ship explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina.

Though she is careful to say that a disaster is never something to be wished for, she explores the resilience of the human spirit in disaster recovery by suggesting that it is a time when many discover a new side of human nature—a giving, caring one built on our sense of community. This description is contrary to our usual disaster movies where many turn to rioting and looting. While this latter can occur, there are likely exponentially higher incidences of the former.

Solnit is of course exploring a dimension of life that we in the social sciences describe as “social capital.” Essentially, this is the glue the binds us together and how strong that glue is. Like invested money, social capital can grow or shrink, depending upon how communities evolve over time. A disaster is a time when social capital is tapped as a community resource.

Robert Putnam, in “Bowling Alone,” observes that, like our infrastructure, it may well be that our social capital is on a declining trajectory. Metaphorically, Putnam suggests that the decline in Friday evening bowling leagues signifies that we are less and less closely glued together in the specific geographic sense of community—which is always where a disaster hits. The impact of Putnam’s book was huge—and it is still hotly debated.

Some say we are just bound together differently, as in Internetted social networks. As I looked at these today—the obvious conclusion was that they may be “new” neighborhoods, but they remain virtual for all of the reality of the people who populate them.

Disaster strikes neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions, not networks. Networks are what we need to recover, and it is questionable in my mind whether those that are virtually glued together have as much disaster resilience as ones that are created in a neighborhood coffee shop or pub. I don’t question the glue; I just question its disaster resilience.

This raises the question of course of how we might go about rethinking our notion of social capital in connection with disasters. Solnit suggests that it is human nature to want to come together. In thinking about creating more resilient communities, how do we facilitate that in a way that helps communities better understand its vital role in recovery?

John Plodinec

Another Take on our Nation’s Infrastructure Crisis

March 22nd, 2011 - John Plodinec  

The excellent recent postings by my colleague Andy Felts are doing a fine job of pointing out the crisis our country is facing with its infrastructure.  It is a serious problem compounded by our federal deficit, and the very real lack of resources being faced by many of our cities, counties and states. 

The Chinese ideogram for “crisis” is made up of two characters – “danger” and “opportunity.”  One facet of resilience is finding the opportunity in a crisis.  When we talk about the state of our infrastructure we tend to stress the dangers – especially when talking to politicians.  We will eventually fix our infrastructure.  We may do it in a deliberate and planned manner, or in response to more incidents like the bridge collapse in Minneapolis.  In other words, on either a “pay me now,” or a “pay me [more] later” basis. 

But if we proceed wisely to repair and rebuild our infrastructure, I see real opportunities that are too often overlooked.  Here in the US, by using better materials, building in better locations, using sensors to allow us to know the conditional status of our infrastructure at almost any point in time, we can again make our infrastructure a competitive advantage.  Investments like these will reduce maintenance costs, provide greater safety, and allow us an extended life for what we rebuild.

And the use of these same new technologies can also spark real economic growth from foreign buyers. The infrastructure in much of the newer developed world (esp. what Thomas Barnett calls the “new core” – Brazil, India…) though younger than ours – is built on the American model, with American ideas.  If we can push to make good investments and solve our own problems soon, the solutions we develop will provide economic opportunities for us as countries in Latin America, Asia and elsewhere begin to face the same challenges we are now.  American firms can once more be in the forefront of rebuilding the infrastructure of the world.

Certainly we should stress the dangers when talking about our infrastructure crisis.  However, we should also stress the opportunities inherent in dealing with those dangers.  We should not allow our current fiscal mess to prevent us from investing in ourselves in ways that will provide a huge return on that investment.

Warren Edwards

The Status of the Community Resilience System Initiative

March 10th, 2011 - Warren Edwards  

For those blog readers who are interested in the status of the Community and Regional Resilience Institute (CARRI) Community Resilience System Initiative – a quick update.  Just about a year ago we at CARRI with the concurrence of our DHS colleagues decided that our experience in over two years of research that combined the insights of a distinguished group of academic researchers with practical experience in a number of communities warrented an effort to build a practical, useful, web enabled Community Resilience System.  Our goal was to take a year and coordinate the effort of a much wider group of experts from academia, from the full fabric of community life and from the private business sector to create a robust set of processes and tools that would allow any community to understand, assess, measure, improve and reward community resilience.  Our plan was (and is) to have this web-enabled system completed as a prototype ready for initial testing and refinement by April 1, 2011 and fully functional and available for community-based developmental pilots by July.  We are on track.

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.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Water, Water Everywhere . . . And Not a Drop to Drink

March 8th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

While it is ultimately difficult to prioritize segments of our infrastructures, the CARRI team has generally concluded that water is high on the list along with adequate power. Difficult to say which is more important since we know water systems need power to pump water. Hospitals can have emergency generators, but we know a lot less about how long they can go without water. We know as well that they consume very large quantities of it.

The recent cholera outbreak in Haiti has exposed twenty-first century youth to a problem as old as human communities—the need for clean water. It may come as a surprise to many, but it is widely held that the provision of safe, potable water is the single greatest contributor to our longer life spans.

There are many communities in the United States that have serious drinking water supply problems. Most know that the greater Los Angeles area is too dry to sustain its population and water must be piped in from a distance. Many other western cities have made the list of those facing water shortages. Closer to the east coast, Atlanta has now made the list. Doubtful that any would argue water shortage as an issue influencing a community’s ongoing resilience.

What may be less clear is the growing fragility of the water delivery system. Underground, out of sight, there are some very large man-made streams. Water mains in excess of 72 inches in size crisscross communities, having to endure extreme variations in temperature, pressure, and the constant shifting of the earth, including that created by cars on the surface.

The force of a large water main breaking is something to be reckoned with. It can toss cars like matchbook toys. It can flood basements in seconds. I can sweep people away with virtually no warning.

 Here is another fact probably not well known. Most all underground water lines leak—that is what eventually leads to a major break, and it makes sense when seen that way. A loss of 10 to 20 percent of the water pumped is considered ‘acceptable.’ But a sudden drop in pressure from a burst line can require extraordinary precautions to maintain sanitation.

 The American Waterworks Association tells us that a water main breaks every two minutes—for a total annual count of 300,000. The nation’s water system was mostly built in the 1950s and 60s—and is rapidly aging. Washington DC’s average pipe age is 77 years.

Needless to say, a community whose pipes do not hold water very well in normal times will probably experience even worse problems in the aftermath of a disaster. Water pipes are indeed, out of sight, and thus we don’t have to look at them as a part of our aging infrastructure. But we should.

Or are they really out sight? Aren’t they really readily visible when you walk in your kitchen and turn on the tap

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Infrastructure and Resilience–Or Lack Thereof?

February 28th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

In this blog, I am pushing the limits of my knowledge—and hope that any kind readers would correct me if I’m wrong.

One of the most resonant statements we have made throughout the entire CARRI experience is that a community’s trajectory before a disaster will likely be exacerbated. Not something hard to understand. A community that has been experiencing an economic boom will likely do better post-disaster, and one that is not, vice-versa. Ditto for crime or housing problems.

So much of our attention on disasters has been focused on physical devastation that I think it is time to put the record straight. We need our water systems, roads, water treatment facilities, public buildings, bridges, to be in the best shape possible to increase community resilience. Out of sight does not mean out of mind.

So, I ask this question: Where are we, as a nation, heading on our infrastructure? When I Google “America’s decaying infrastructure,” I get myriad hits. Am I searching under the wrong street light?

Many years ago I had a wonderful point made to me by a woman working in transportation planning in Kingsport, TN. As we were talking about the need to plan for capital expenditures, she very gently pointed out to me that sometimes the unseen things in our infrastructure are neglected because they are precisely that—unseen.

In the face of that fact, it is easy to see why major stakeholders would favor a new coliseum over repairing a bridge. But if the bridge is necessary to carry people to the new coliseum, is it any less necessary?

I can make my point here quickly. If we as a nation are on a downward trajectory with respect to our infrastructure, then we are slowly becoming less resilient. Facilities that might have survived a natural or manmade event may show their age. Part of the interesting part about participating in CARRI has been how much it has expanded my vision. A viable neighborhood or community that becomes cut off as a result of decaying infrastructure has experienced its own manmade disaster. Only in this case, we have met the enemy, and he is us.

More on this topic to come, including some hard data…

admin

Surge Capacity Planning in Fair Weather Saves the Day When Skies Darken

February 3rd, 2011 - admin  

In risk management terms, a major snow storm in the Northeast in late December is a high-probability event. The impact of such an event, however, is determined not only by the severity of the storm, but on how well the community is prepared for and responds to the disaster. As an anticipatable event, identifying resources and issuing memoranda of understanding before a snow disaster saves time, confusion, money and lives.

Health professionals speak of “surge capacity” when they are confronted with having to treat more patients than they can routinely handle. Fire departments do as well when they must deal with a massive conflagration. Clearly, the importance of addressing surge capacity should not be limited to fire departments and hospitals.

If a community asks itself the question – what happens if the demands of an event exceed municipal resources; what provisions have been put in place? – that is a first step toward mounting a strong emergency response. An overwhelmed snow removal fleet is no different than a multi-alarm fire or a disaster that brings a surge of patients to a hospital and overwhelms the system.

The old adage, “A stitch in time saves nine,” may be hackneyed, but it does make a point. By asking critical questions and preparing before a disaster means the system is already in place when a disaster hits. Accessing capacity is the first step toward coming up with regionally deployable strategies to mitigate against situations where capacity is exceeded. Though the concept of a “surge capacity fleet” may be new, the key steps needed to undertake such an effort are hardly elusive:

  • Identify independent contractors and others with snow removal equipment
  • Establish a universal agreement process to bring outside contractors into the emergency response equation
  • Identify gaps in the snow removal system, i.e., if the city’s fleet is wholly occupied clearing major arteries, the surge capacity fleet would be assigned to clear other prioritized areas such as emergency vehicle routes,  bus stops and other commuter services, secondary roads, etc. Included in this is the establishment of a system for prioritizing what areas should be cleared in order of importance
  • Establish an incident management system to synchronize existing resources with unified command and traditional emergency management
  • Establish maintenance and logistics support agreements, contingency contracting and volunteer corps. Working out matters such as how private contractors will be paid is much better to establish before the disaster than after when the economic clean-up can be messy.

During an emergency, people want to pitch in and do what they can to make a difference. An organized system to harness those resources can spell the difference between a disaster having a high impact on a community or reducing the impact to something much more manageable.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Vulnerable Populations or Assets?

January 27th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

My graduate advisor and I were once talking about Marx and the fact that the spontaneous proletarian he predicted would occur was obviously not going to. He looked at me and said—“Look at how Marx described the proletariat. It was always in negative terms. They lacked this or that; they used religion as an opiate, and are reduced to an animal-like existence. Who would want to be a member of such a group?”

As I keep wrestling with the idea of “vulnerable populations” that has become so ubiquitous in disaster literature, I wonder out loud if the very term “vulnerable” is a good one to use. I doubt that anyone would like to be characterized as such and probably don’t think of themselves that way either.

In 1993, John McKnight and John Kretzmann published Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets. They were specifically reacting to the growing practice of doing “needs analyses” in our poor, vulnerable communities. In doing needs analysis, we concentrate on what the communities don’t have. In doing what they called “asset analysis or mapping,” the focus on what they do have.

Most of the analyses of vulnerable populations tend to incorporate negatives—implicitly saying what they need. Income is likely low. Educational achievement is lower than average. There may be large numbers of single-parent households and a large number of renters. It is easy to see what they don’t have—more difficult to see what they do have.

A few years ago, Rev. Bill Stanfield moved his wife and kids into Chickora Cherokee, a North Charleston neighborhood, and founded a nonprofit called “Metanoia.” He looked at what the community did have—the capacity to become more self-sufficient. He followed John McKnight’s observation in The Careless Society that large numbers of social service providers meeting “needs” in a community tended to weaken it rather than strengthen it. Slowly, Metanoia has promoted grass roots, community engagement and has built a much stronger and more resilient community by building on assets, not meeting needs.

The point here is relatively simple. As long as we focus on a community’s needs or vulnerabilities, we neglect to see what it has in the way of assets. Many poor, rural communities may be wealthy in social capital—and more and more analysts are seeing how critical this asset is in disaster recovery. Social capital may exist in the form of tight bonds among a group, the presence of extended families, and frequented “third places” like a barbershop, beauty shop, or diner.

Where social capital is created, it can be used as a building block to improve lives. Neighbors might begin to use neighborhood handymen rather than outside contractors. Metanoia provides daycare where the caregivers are community residents and operates a farmer’s market where residents can sell vegetables and crafts that they grow or make.

 There can be little question that these steps have all increased Chickora Cherokee’s resilience even though it still has many needs and would be characterized as vulnerable. I’m sure that the residents are looking at what they do have rather than what they don’t

CARRI is all about promoting more community self-sufficiency. You can’t do that by constantly looking at what you don’t have.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Cascading Events Redux

January 3rd, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

The late, great Senator Everett Dirksen is reputed to have said, “A Billion [dollars] here, a Billion there, and pretty soon you are talking real money.” This pronouncement, by the way, was made in the 1960s when he was criticizing what he thought was the profligate spending style of Lyndon Johnson.

I suppose we could change the billion to trillion and the quote would be more accurate for today’s times. I think a billion is still pretty accurat

The massive snowstorm, a natural, anticipatable disaster, that hit the US NE last week is said to have likely cost retailers a billion dollars in lost holiday revenue.

A few blogs ago, I wrote about cascading events in terms of the old adage, “for want of a nail, a horseshoe was lost, for want of a horseshoe, a rider was lost….”

In this case, the reality is a lot of small businesses rely on holiday spending for as much as half their annual revenue. The battle will not be lost for a while. Many will struggle for a few months before collapsing. When they do, it will not be readily apparent that a snowstorm a few months ago was their loss of a nail.

In resilience thinking, this leads me to ponder two things and put them out as a challenge for thinking about slow motion disasters.

First, it would behoove us to think about the role that small businesses play in our own communities.

There is an obvious economic impact. The business will have to let go of employees that will, in turn, cause other employees to lose jobs and lead to predictable outcomes. This affects tax revenues and so on.

Another impact might be structural. A closing small business that anchored a neighborhood enclave with others might be a tipping point, causing a downturn in that specific place and result in more negative effects.

But there are human impacts as well.

That small business might have been the sponsor of a little league baseball team or an active member of the Chamber and participated in Rotary.

It might have been part of our sense of community. I just finished watching one of myriad food shows on TV that seeks out small restaurants/businesses that are great places to eat. They are often unique structures, as eclectic in style as possible—old barns, basements, bars, etc.  Compare that with the programmed, theme-style look of chain restaurants. Are you in Kansas or California?

To extend that idea, high-end chair retail stores that can pay top dollar rents are, increasingly occupying downtown Charleston, once populated by unique small businesses. They occupy the same buildings, but they have lost a sense of location. I think that Charleston’s old core is changing.

The real heart of Charleston has moved further north —and that is where you find Charlestonians frequenting. On the food shows, patrons comment that the “come here all the time.” The small boutiques, art shops, clothing stores can become community gathering places.

In all those ways, a small business in a community is everyone’s business. But it’s “just a nail.”

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