How would a CARRI community recover from a tornado?

May 5th, 2011 - Warren Edwards

Earlier this week, a colleague e-mailed me and asked to send him some ideas on how I thought a Community and Regional Resilience Institute community using the Community Resilience System would recover from a tornado. I thought it made sense to give him a description of the environment within which the community would be conducting their tornado recovery. This is how I think a CRS community would be positioned for response and long-term recovery:

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.

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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.

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Resiliency IS Protection

May 5th, 2009 - Warren Edwards

For at least two years there has been an ongoing debate on the emphasis that the Department of Homeland Security should place on resilience in lieu of a perceived prejudice for protection.

The juxtaposition of resiliency and protection as themes for the Department of Homeland Security misstates the issues – it is not either/or. A different way of looking at the problem is as a continuum of Prevent, Protect (to include Mitigate), Respond and Recover — with preparedness as a theme underlying all of those tasks AND Resilience as the outcome. One needs to prepare to prevent, prepare to protect, prepare to respond and prepare to recover. Creating a capacity to address all of these areas in a coherent manner builds resilience in a system or in an organization. The Nation’s current challenge is to establish the full mission in one inclusive continuum that addresses national expectations and includes systems designed to achieve full recovery at the end of an event, preparedness for each segment of the continuum, and the inclusion of all relevant public and private actors in the processes.

Resilience is the goal of the continuum. We cannot prevent all occurrences, but we can prevent some, and we should focus on prevention where prevention is realistic – terrorism, flooding, pandemic and food borne illness, for instance. We cannot protect ourselves from all things, but we can focus on things that absolutely require high levels of protection – nuclear power plants, mass transportation assets, critical communications structures. While we will need to respond to failures in prevention and protection, we can focus recovery preparations on those events where we know that we will fail – hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, ice storms. True preparedness for recovery requires more than the current focus on short-term recovery of basic services and functions. It requires instead an adjustment of thinking which aims from the beginning at regaining the rhythms of life, commerce, and interactions which define the long term recovery of every community. We need to see and understand the linkages between the work done before the event along the resiliency continuum and the ability to recover fully and quickly after the event. read the entire article >

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