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.

So, over the next few months, I’m going to be writing Community Resilience for Dummies – detailing what this neophyte has learned about community resilience in a way that I hope others can use. As we in CARRI have talked to people about resilience it has become clear that – like sustainability – resilience is a word in danger of losing its meaning because it is being used by so many in so many different ways. So I’ll start by talking about what community resilience is.

As do so many others, we at CARRI have our own definition of resilience:

A community’s ability to anticipate risk, limit impact, and bounce back rapidly through adaptation, evolution, and growth in the face of turbulent change.

In fact, on the CARRI website, you’ll find a document that compares and contrasts many of the definitions.

Most people who are using the term resilience are doing so in a crisis context – a crisis being anything that strains the community’s resources. While resilience may be an inherent trait of a community, its resilience is only seen in how well it recovers from the crisis. As a community evolves over time, it may become more or less resilient. Thus, in these parlous economic times, most communities have become less resilient toward natural disasters or human-induced crises due to dwindling resources – both human and financial. Those communities that have maintained their same level of resilience (and the few that have enhanced it) have generally done so by finding ways to adapt to the financial crisis they face.

Adaptation is the key to resilience – it’s the ability to turn disaster into opportunity; to create social capital to augment finance; to form partnerships to replace or repair needed infrastructure when no one entity has enough money to fund projects. Greenburg, KS’ response to the devastating tornado that hit the town is an example. Prior to the 2007 storm, the town was in danger of dying. It used the opportunity provided by the devastation to attempt to create a different and more sustainable Greensburg.

Mayor Tom Tait’s (Anaheim CA) “Hi, Neighbor” campaign is an example. It recognizes that in the event of an earthquake, one’s neighbors are the real first responders, and should be the enduring support structure for individuals and families. The campaign seeks to build up the “social capital” of Anaheim’s neighborhoods.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey provides another example. It has formed a public-private partnership to fund and operate a replacement for the Goethals Bridge that links New York and New Jersey. This type of arrangement would have been unheard of even five years ago; now, it represents a very innovative way for a community to do what’s necessary with less.

Thus, while resilience is not a uniquely American trait, this ability to make lemonade when you’re handed lemons is embedded in the American spirit. And it doesn’t take a dummy to see that our resilience is being tested as never before. In the next post in this series, I’ll begin looking at what makes up community resilience – starting with leadership.

My personal fascination is about how we make decisions, and the articles that I will be writing for this blog are about decision making and how, by understanding some of the ways that we make decisions, we can improve our decision making.

 What has decision making got to do with resilience? When we are planning to create a more resilient group or organization, we are constantly making decisions about how we can best do this and what threats we need to take into consideration. On the personal side when we experience a crisis situation, we are making decisions for ourselves and others. Unfortunately in all these situations our decision making processes are subject to a number  of built in biases; however if we can understand these biases, then we are in a position where we can develop techniques and ways of thinking to counteract these innate biases.

It is difficult to clearly quantify how much poor decisions cost either in monetary terms or in lives and suffering, but it would seem obvious that even a small improvement in our decision making could have really significant benefits. In this article I would like to introduce some of the ideas that I will be developing in future articles.

I will start by stating the obvious – we make decisions with our brains. But let us consider what our brains are for. They have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to help us survive, and to that end they are highly effective decision making instruments. However, in modern day situations these mechanisms for decision making may not be the best. So rather than spending time on developing sophisticated decision making strategies it is bound to be useful to understand some of the mechanisms that our brains have developed to make decisions. By understanding these mechanisms we can become sensitized to their shortcomings and so develop approaches to counteract these shortcomings and thus make better decisions.

We can make better decisions. The good news is that we have a brain! In our brain we have over ten thousand million neurons, and the number of possible interconnections between these neurons is 10 followed by 100 zeros. We have an immensely complex piece of machinery in our brains. However, is the brain fixed in the way it processes information?

In order to drive a traditional black cab in London, a taxi driver has to pass ‘the knowledge’. This is a test about the streets of London and the best way to navigate around them. It has been known for some time that the hippocampus, an area of the brain, is responsible for processing geographical information. In the year 2000 a team from University College London scanned the brains of some taxi drivers and found that their hippocampuses were bigger than those of normal people. This is a really significant finding! It shows that exercise and practice can physically develop areas of the brain and increase the connectivity of the neurons.

The bad news is that the brain has a very specialist design. It has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years for survival purposes and not necessarily for making the best decisions. Part of the specialist design is our memory systems. When brain scans are done on chess players some interesting results are found. Masters and Grand Masters seem to have activity towards the rear of the brain which is normally associated with our memory systems. Less competent chess players tend to have most activity towards the front of the brain, in the pre-frontal cortex, which is normally associated with decision making. When we make decisions are we using our memory of past situations or analysing each situation anew?

Large areas of our brains have developed for pattern recognition. This is obviously useful for recognizing objects and faces. Unfortunately we also tend to see patterns when there are actually none there.

Our brains are also very good at establishing habits. These are very useful ’short cuts’ to our decision making processes. We don’t need to think about everything that we come across on a daily basis. Let’s have a look at one habit we have developed – how we fold our hands.

So let’s try it out. I’d like to ask you to fold your hands. If you look at your hands you will notice that one index finger is above the other one. When we are young we have to learn to fold our hands like this. Each way is equally likely at this point. However a habit quickly forms and one way becomes dominant. When we are older we will usually only fold our hands in one way. So for most of our lives we have been folding our hands in only one way. You would think that a habit as well established as that would be hard to break. But let’ try this. Try folding your hands so that the other index finger is on top. What does it feel like? Most people find this quite uncomfortable but bear with me for a moment. Let’s try slowly folding our hands back to the original position and slowly back again to the second position. And then back again, and back again, and back again, and back again, and back again, and finally back again. Now just shake your hands. So let’s try it again. I’d like to ask you to fold your hands again. Can you remember if this is the way you did it originally?

What’s interesting about this is that most people, after only five repetitions, feel much less awkward. Some people cannot even tell the difference any more. This is a very simple example of how a life-long habit can be overturned (or at least lessened) by only five practices at doing it a different way.

We have seen that our brains have some limitations when it comes to decision making.

The good news is that if we understand what these limitations are, we can reprogram even long established habits. We can also grow parts of our brain.

So if we can understand how our decision making works, we can spot the deficiencies in our decision making. Knowing what these deficiencies are, we can take countermeasures to improve them.

Boatlift tells the sadly under-reported story of the marine evacuation of Manhattan on 9/11.  In 9 hours, almost half a million people were evacuated in all manner of boats – more people than were evacuated from Dunkirk in nine days!  This operation was called for by a Coast Guard lieutenant (on his own) and coordinated with a wide array of maritime organizations and individual vessel captains.  The scenes with the gravelly-voiced captain of the fishing scow Amberjack V were perhaps the most affecting of the day, as he talked about never wanting to have to say “I should have.”

Wounded Warriors focuses on a few of the “wounded warriors” from our mid-East conflicts.  It demonstrates forcefully their resilience in the face of devastating wounds, finding opportunities for themselves in the midst of their personal disasters.  In the panel discussion after the video presentation, Denis Oliverio (who had been wounded while warning others from the top of his tank) typified the upbeat feelings of the wounded warriors when asked what he would do differently – “Duck!”

Gulf Coast Resilience is a paean to the resilient spirit of those on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.  Mayor George Schloegel (Gulfport) told amazing stories about getting the Hancock Bank back into business after Katrina, while Chief Pat Sullivan and Bill Stallworth portrayed the human impacts so well.  After the video, Governor Haley Barbour accepted the first Community Resilience Award on behalf of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Renewal is a glimpse into the near future of the World Trade Center site.  The two cascading pools of water where the Twin Towers were are belted with a bronze ribbon honoring the names of those who died.  The new One World Trade Center skyscraper will make a statement while being the safest building in the world.  But, for me, the real star is the World Trade Center transportation hub that will open in about two years – a beautiful representation of a bird taking flight – it will be as striking in its setting as the Opera House is in Sydney Harbour. 

Interspersed among the videos were talks from a diverse group of speakers, each speaking to one or more aspects of the theme:  Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano; Mary Fetchet, Executive Director of the Voices of September 11^th; FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate; Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta; former Secretary of State Madeline Albright; Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour; representatives from Canada; the chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation, and others.  The story of Gander, which more than doubled in size when on 9/11 planes from foreign lands were diverted there – the friendship and kinship with we Americans they showed – was a quiet coda to the earlier stories of resilience.

Closing the event, Warren Edwards announced the names of the 7 leading communities who will be the initial pilots for CARRI’s Community Resilience System (CRS):  Anaheim, CA; Anne Arundel County and Annapolis, MD; the Charleston (SC) Low Country Area; Gadsden, AL; Greenwich, CT; the Mississippi Gulf Coast; and Mount Juliet, TN.  These communities will use the CRS to enhance their resilience and at the same time will provide feedback to CARRI so that we can improve its usability and usefulness.

Many may not know that regular homeowner’s insurance does not cover flooding. This was the reason for protracted legal cases on insurance reimbursement after Katrina. If a home was destroyed by water (flood), then private insurers did not have to reimburse for damages. If the owner had enough foresight to buy flood insurance—separately purchased through an insurance agent but backed by the US government’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)—then they would be reimbursed. If the home was destroyed by wind, then private insurance would cover—but when a home was simply gone in an area that had both high wind and water, it was very difficult to say which destroyed it.

Homes and buildings in high-risk flood areas with mortgages from federally regulated or insured lenders are required to have flood insurance. But many homes that could flood in an exceptional event are not required to have flood insurance. Such homes are not within a FEMA defined “flood zone.”

 Zones that begin with “A” or “V” are high-risk flood zones, and the purchase of flood insurance is federally mandated on loans secured by properties located in communities that participate in the National Flood Insurance Program. Zones “C,” “B,” and “X” have a lower risk of flooding, and the federal mandatory purchase requirements do not apply. “V” flood zones are on the coast and are subject to wind-driven water, i.e., waves. “A” zones are subject to a 1% or greater chance of flooding in any given year; in short, they are in the 100-year flood plain.

Since most people buy their homes with a mortgage, if they are not required to buy flood insurance they assume they do not need it. With water forced many miles inland and torrential rains, many Katrina property owners found out the hard way that they were not going to be reimbursed or only partially reimbursed for their loss.

Access to outside resources—in this case, insurance money—is a critical part of community resilience. In lower flood risk areas, NFIP-backed insurance can be as low as $129 a year. That seems like a very small amount to insure against the risk of total loss.

Resilient communities build public awareness of the risks they face and the potential losses—they do not rely on mortgage companies to tell them their risk. No doubt many without flood insurance wished they had known this as they watched Irene move up the coast.

But then the grind of recovery comes. I remember in Charleston seeing debris truck after debris truck after debris truck for several months. I remember getting several flat tires from roofing nails that were blown off roofs.

I remember the task of cleaning up my office building after it took several inches of surge water. Many thought the College of Charleston should shut down for the semester. But President Harry Lightsey defied those faculty and staff, and the College reopened a mere week and one-half after Hugo. The College’s buildings were largely ok—some with water damage and blown out windows and others with stripped roofs. Getting the College of Charleston kids back on the city’s streets was a remarkably fresh breath of normalcy.

In yesterday’s (August 17^th, 2011) New York Times, there was a remarkable story. I quote the reporter, A.G. Sulzberger in the story:

JOPLIN, Mo. — When the red brick schools here were reduced to rubble by a deadly tornado three months ago, local leaders announced a goal that seemed like a longshot: the new school year would start on time.

But on Wednesday the city made good on its promise, and students reunited for the first day of school, marking the end of a difficult summer as they streamed excitedly into makeshift facilities that replaced the 10 schools damaged or destroyed by the tornado on May 22.

As they exchanged standard so-good-to-see-you-again greetings — the boys slapping hands, the girls embracing — juniors and seniors swapped schedules and marveled at the modern touches of their new high school, built in just 55 days inside a recently vacant department store at the back of a shopping mall. Outside, residents of a local retirement home lined the streets to welcome them.

 What could make life seem more normal than kids going back to school in the fall? With effective leadership, Joplin was able to achieve a “longshot.” Going for a reopening of schools likely took some priority over other things that needed tending, but such are the choices we have to make in planning recovery.

It is a remarkable story that gives me heart in the ability of communities to be resilient. Joplin has given us all a clear message about what is important in being resilient, and we should both take heed and applaud them. A difficult summer notwithstanding, the community has likely turned the recovery corner.

Developing a plan, especially in a time when so many communities are strapped for resources, means making choices – we are going to do this, we are going to stop doing that, we’ll do the other later.  In the CRS, we invite the community to develop a vision for its future that in effect becomes an operational definition of its common values and aspirations.  This vision becomes the set of scales that the community uses to weigh the many options for action and to prioritize them.

CARRI recognizes that creating a common vision is hard work.  It often requires the patience of Job to reach a consensus about what the community wants its future to be.  But reaching that consensus is essential.  Lacking a common vision, it is virtually impossible to take any long-term action to improve the community. 

Our current impasse over the federal budget is a perfect example of this and a microcosm of the macrocosmic problem that plagues our nation at all levels:  an unwillingness to prioritize because we lack a common vision of what we want to become.  One of the primary reasons we lack this vision is because we do not have a common understanding of the problem. For example, surveys indicate that less than one-third of the electorate understands the realities of where our federal dollars go (40% debt, 40% entitlements, about 15% defense, and the rest everything else).

In developing the CRS, we have tried to provide community leaders with information about their communities – strengths, weaknesses, threats – that they can use to forge the necessary common understanding of the state of their community.  Once that is gained, then achieving a common vision becomes easier (I didn’t say easy!).  That vision can then drive the development of a plan to make the vision a reality.  If done well, the result is a more resilient, more vibrant and more vital community.

Welcome as well is a recognition that some actions taken during emergency response may actually erode social capital. Before Hurricane Hugo, in the Charleston region, there was one vehicle access point to Sullivan’s Island and the Isle of Palms. That was the Sawyer Bridge—a drawbridge that was literally spun off its balance point by Hugo’s winds.

Residents of Sullivan’s Island and the Isle of Palms were denied boat access to the island by National Guardsmen. The argument was the islands were overrun with snakes (an unlikely event since a surge would have swept them inland) and that structures were unstable and dangerous. The latter point is valid, but in many other areas throughout the region that actually were harder hit that the two islands, residents could not be stopped from entering because they had multiple points of access. I walked down King Street in downtown Charleston two days after the Hurricane when the street was littered with broken glass and everything from pieces of metal roofs to downed street lights.

From a risk analysis standpoint, the issue was one of someone stepping on a nail or getting cut from a sharp object. I do not question the good intentions of emergency managers here—rather only whether or not they factored social capital into their decision. Some individuals had a chance to sift through their wrecked homes and salvage things that were personally valuable to them. After several days of rain and weeks of being denied access, much of what they could have recovered was no longer recoverable.

Social capital is about holding on to a sense of place and that includes connections to the past. This is why it should be included in our analysis of community resilience.

But at the same time, by vaulting social capital to the forefront, I wonder if there is too much of a backlash.

In the social sciences, we speak of “necessary” and “sufficient” conditions for something to happen. A sufficient condition is one that in and of itself is enough to cause something to happen. A necessary condition is just that, but not sufficient to cause something to happen. Water in the atmosphere is necessary for rain, but not sufficient in and of itself. It needs other factors—temperature, etc. to make rain occur.

In terms of resilience, we should see social capital as necessary. Absent strong bonds to community and place, both created by social capital, community resilience will be seriously degraded. But social capital is not sufficient in and of itself to create community resilience.

Aside from social capital, communities need access to resources for effective and efficient recovery. Resources can come in many forms—help from outside volunteers, insurance, donations, government aid, savings accounts, etc. But these are not sufficient for recovery absent a resolve on the part of community members to stay and rebuild.

In addition, a community whose infrastructure is in bad shape before a disaster will have recovery hindered no matter how much social capital they have.

Recovery is about time in a very important way—how quickly a community can rebound from a disaster. Strong reserves of social capital are necessary, but so are access to resources. So is ensuring that a community’s infrastructure is maintained. There are a lot of necessary parts of recovery. None, alone, are sufficient.

The first ingredient is trust.  For children, this means being aware of their emotions and being able to share them with people they trust.  For communities, it is building trust so that everyone can speak honestly and openly about their values, their hopes, their concerns and their community.

The second ingredient is impulse control.  Resilient children have developed a “stop and think” mechanism that helps them overcome the urge to act on their impulses. (Some of us are still working on that!)  Resilient communities recognize that, after a disaster, there is a tremendous urge to get back to normal life quickly.  Thus, these communities develop a vision and goals and sometimes even an action plan prior to a disaster to guide the thousands of individual actions that their members will take after it occurs.

Resilient children and resilient communities both have “realistic optimism.”  They are able to recognize that things are less than perfect, but nevertheless have an upbeat belief that things will get better.  For both children and communities, this optimism breeds health, effectiveness, and the ability to look at things honestly – what Nikos Kazantzakis calls “staring into the abyss.”

Closely allied with realistic optimism is the fourth ingredient – self-confidence.  Both resilient children and communities are aware of their strengths and of their ability to use them.  They both recognize that they can not only cope with adversity but can effect change as well.

The next ingredient is empathy – the ability to make meaningful connections with others.  Anyone who has followed the work of Rick Weil looking at recovery after Katrina recognizes that community connections – both the strong ones inside the community and the weaker ones to the outside world – may be even more important for recovery than material resources.

Just as realistic optimism and self-confidence are closely aligned, so are the last to ingredients – reaching out and flexible thinking.  By reaching out, Reivich means a willingness to try new things.  For communities, this implies an openness to innovative approaches to solve wicked problems.  Flexible thinking is the ability to look at things from different perspectives.  For communities this implies not only a willingness to consider new ideas, but an innate interest in getting the whole picture, not just that from the leader’s perch.

Mix these ingredients with a generous amount of community involvement and bake in the passion of people who care about their community.  All in all, a good recipe for a resilient community.

Created in 1974, CDBG has given local governments throughout the US Billions of discretionary dollars that the communities have used primarily to improve infrastructure. Money could be used, for example, to do curbing and guttering in a low-income area or to provide beautification projects for blighted downtowns or improve the storm readiness of housing. As a block grant, the money could be used in an array of projects contributing to community development.

Over the thirty-five years plus that the feds have given CDBG grants, communities have come to rely heavily on the resources for infrastructure improvement. But with the federal government in the midst of suffering the worst budget woes in its history, it is all too tempting to cut programs that do not directly impact its own activities.

Why do I write this for a CARRI blog? There are two reasons.

First, and perhaps most importantly, CARRI has always taken the position that in the event of a disaster, communities will likely be more on their own than they think they will be.

After the recent tornado onslaught in Mississippi, some residents who accepted FEMA trailers were distressed to find out their community zoning laws banned new trailers. This was for good reason. Trailers don’t perform well in high wind. So, being on your own can also means that you may not get what you want or need. After Hugo, Charleston was inundated with donated clothing. There was truckload after truckload of winter garments that came in—at a time when the temperature was hovering in the 90s.

Researchers have consistently shown that the expectation of government aid exceeds what can or will be done. Most may remember the painted sign on a New Orleans home after Katrina that asked plaintively, “Where’s FEMA?” The good news is that FEMA was there. The bad news is that FEMA was there in a way that could never hope to meet expectations.

Second, given the state of the federal government’s budget, it is unlikely the money that locals have come to rely on for infrastructure improvement will ever be restored. Communities will no doubt not take up the slack by raising taxes, so the rate of crumbling of our infrastructure will accelerate.

Resilient communities cannot spin yarn into gold. But they can and should plan on recovering from disasters by using what little yarn they have in strategic ways that are thought out in advance. They can also be clear on how much they can actually get from outside governments and volunteer organizations. The CARRI Community Resilience System (CRS) can help them do that and point the way to how they can plan to recover from inevitable disasters.