Warren Edwards

The Power of Community Assessments

January 3rd, 2012 - Warren Edwards  

We often view assessments of our communities as mechanical processes accomplished by outside experts who tell us what’s wrong with our community. But community resilience assessments collaboratively accomplished by the full fabric of the community using its own “experts” can be a powerful tool for building community unity, creating positive energy and amplifying what is right.

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.

John Plodinec

Resilience and the Hole in the Rock Expedition

December 5th, 2011 - John Plodinec  

Jenae Holtzhafer in the Emmaus (PA) Patch posed this question in a posting this summer.

“What if our circumstances on this Earth suddenly changed? Would we be able to endure the extreme physical and mental challenges faced by our ancestors to push through the hardships and survive with nothing more than basic necessities?”

She pointed to the Hole in the Rock expedition of 1879 as an example of the resilience of our forebears. For those who don’t know the story, in late 1879, 236 Mormons set out on a missionary expedition to southeastern Utah. They had selected the shortest path to their destination – they expected it to take only six weeks, but one that was largely unexplored. Trapped by snow behind them two weeks after they started, they were forced to go forward. Perhaps their most difficult feat was building a wagon road through the hole in the rock – a narrow cut in the cliffs surrounding the Colorado River gorge – and crossing the river. It took them about 8 weeks to build the road and get all of their supplies across, and another 10 to reach the site they choose to establish their “colony.” Amazingly, no one died on the five-month trek, and 238 arrived at the new settlement – two babies were born en route.

Holtzhafer’s gut answer were “No, we are not as resilient – we have lost the skills to survive these hardships.” A closer reading of history, though, makes her conclusion less compelling. The intrepid party – even though they set out as winter neared – was reasonably well-prepared. Eighty wagons, over 1,000 head of cattle, tools, dynamite and other necessary supplies – they were ready to confront what they faced. They had taken full advantage of the technology available to them. In similar circumstances today, most of us we would do the same. While we may have lost some of the skills those hardy Mormons possessed, we have other skills and technologies they did not have.

However, the expedition has an important lesson to teach us – being ready for surprises. The missionaries expected to be gone about 40 days; instead, they were on the road for 100 more. They didn’t expect to have to build a bridge across the Colorado, but they did.

Most communities try to prepare for specific threats – hurricanes, earthquakes, human-induced crises. But look at some of the events the Gulf Coast has experienced in the last decade – a recession in 2001-2; Hurricane Katrina and the levee break; the BP oil spill; the Great Recession…what’s next?

The pessimist looks at this list and says “Why bother to prepare? The next event may well be different. We’ll just adapt to it when it comes.”

The optimist says, “We’re strong, we will weather whatever comes; let’s prepare for what we know.

But the resilient realist says, “Prepare for the known threats, but be sure to include in your preparations those things that will help you survive and thrive in the face of any threat. Most importantly, make sure your people know each other and will help each other, no matter what threat they face.”

A simple thought, but with some profound implications. First, it means we shouldn’t rely on institutions to pull us through a crisis, but on ourselves. Second, we can’t count on getting resources from outside in a crisis – we can only count on what we have in our homes and our neighborhood. Most importantly, the one thing “Government” in general is not doing but could do to prepare us is to hammer these messages home.

Yesterday, I was speaking to a victim of one of the many floods that have hit the St. Louis area. Her house up to the top of the first story was flooded – she had to live in the upper floors. She “commuted” to wherever she had to go in her neighbors’ boats. She pointed out that it took 45 days before the floodwaters had receded enough for safe vehicular traffic to her home. By the time she and her family were ready to begin recovering, the news cameras had moved on; her story was old news; most of the government assistance was gone. With good grace and a sense of humor, she is coming back more or less on her own, with the help of her friends and neighbors.

Her experience shows that some of us, at least, are as resilient as any who came before. Her experience also testifies to the wisdom of the resilient realist: people are the best preparation for surprises.

John Plodinec

Searching for Resilience: A Walk in the Woods

October 20th, 2011 - John Plodinec  

I read an interesting article recently that crystallized several other thoughts for me. The paper – with the somewhat dry title of Resilience as Resource-based Design of Anticipated Situations (www.resilience-engineering-asso.org/ACTES/2011/Papers/13.pdf) – is couched in the language of safety and risk, but takes a very different approach to identifying resilience than I’ve seen before.

The authors start by talking about traditional safety and risk management approaches. To paraphrase the authors, these approaches have inherent limitations:

• They are based on analysis of failures. They do not reflect either that risks can emerge from “normal” situations, or that some of the greatest risks may actually be unanticipated surprises.
• They seek to mitigate without considering either the real gap between intended actions and real capabilities, or that coping with crises is dependent on “the strategies, initiatives, tinkering and ingenuity brought by individual and collective skills in real time.

The application of these to emergency management seems straightforward and very appropriate.

The authors then go on to quote a definition of resilience by Hollnagel:

The intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions.

I’m not a big fan of defining resilience – too many have spent too much time in what becomes an unproductive exercise in navel contemplation – but the authors put legs under this one by trying to determine how anesthesiologists make decisions both in routine cases and in complex ones. Their conclusions are worth noting because they seem to apply so well to the relationship between the federal government and local community leadership.

• Resilience – in addition to vulnerability assessment – involves consideration of local resources and capabilities.
• Decisions are designed to empower those coping with crisis, and not to control them.
• Organizations should be structured so that local standard practices can be shared.

While some may argue about the conclusions, what was striking to me is the very different way of trying to find resilience. Most of the resilience literature focuses either on vulnerability or on case studies of past disasters. What the authors have done is look at behavior – both in routine and unexpected situations – to try to find clues to resilient behavior.

Thus, if we are trying to judge the resilience of a tree to a high wind, we may walk through the woods looking at one that has fallen and try to judge the cause and how to prevent it from falling. Or, as the authors have done, we can study the forest, during both calm days and those with brisk winds, and see how each tree adapts in its own context.

As we were putting the Community Resilience System (CRS) together, one of the strongest sentiments expressed by our Community Leaders Group was that the CRS had to improve normal operations as well as easing the transition to a new normal. This paper not only agrees with that, but shows that understanding how the community functions in normal conditions is a key to understanding its resilience to a crisis.

In other words, watching how trees bend and sway in the wind can often tell us more about the resilience of trees than exhaustively researching why one fell.

John Plodinec

Planning, Priorities and Resilience

July 25th, 2011 - John Plodinec  

One of the ground rules we in CARRI have set for ourselves in developing the Community Resilience System (CRS) is that it must be outcome-oriented.  As a result, everything in the CRS is focused on helping a community develop and implement a plan to improve its ability to avoid, adapt or learn from adversity.

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.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Social Capital: A necessary but not sufficicent condition for a resilient recovery

July 8th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

There is a growing (and welcome) recognition amongst many disaster recovery researchers on the importance of social capital in rapid and equitable recovery. This is welcome because all too often disaster mitigation and recovery strategies have ignored this important dimension of our lives.

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.

John Plodinec

The Seven Ingredients of Community Resilience

June 29th, 2011 - John Plodinec  

Last week I read an interesting article by Karen Reivich on the resilience of children. I was struck by how relevant her seven ingredients were to communities.  So, with apologies to her for my modifications – the Seven Ingredients of Community Resilience. 

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.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Where are the Feds?

June 22nd, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

It seems virtually certain that the next federal budget will have significant cuts to Community Development Block Grants, commonly referred to as “CDBG.” Some have called for the elimination of the program, arguing the federal government can no longer afford it.

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.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Planning to Recover: Some thoughts on what we know will happen when the flood waters recede

May 10th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

In his last blog, my good colleague, Warren Edwards wrote about what a CARRI Community would do differently after a disaster. He emphasized the need to communicate and develop a vision for a post-disaster community. This blog is intended to follow that line and delve more into what a CARRI Community might do.

 As I write this, the Mississippi Valley is experiencing unprecedented floods that will likely exceed the major one in 1927. Since then, the Mississippi has flooded many times of course. Sometimes these are minor, other times less so. Sometimes, like now, they appear to be catastrophic.

Since we live in a world of scarce resources, communities cannot prepare for every disaster they might face through efforts to mitigate—building yet higher dikes in the case of the Mississippi, which many think is bad policy. When the disaster is big enough, the mitigation efforts, wall/dikes in New Orleans, earthen dikes along the Mississippi, reinforced structures elsewhere, will fail and the disaster consequences may be all the greater when they do.

It is at this point that a community’s real resilience is tested. Even if they cannot employ techniques/policies that mitigate against disaster, they can still plan their recovery. We are witnessing some of this resilience thinking in many communities along the Mississippi. Homeowners are not just evacuating, they are moving their furniture and belongings as well in anticipation of flood levels yet to come.

 That said, much rebuilding must take place after the flood recedes. This is easy to see. But how many communities have developed resilient practices around that? How many have precertified building contractors who will come in to help rebuild? The alternative is a backlog of filings and unnecessary delays in getting back to normal? One easy way to precertify is simply to recognize licensed contractors that come from communities with essentially the same building codes. As well, how many communities have thought about their permitting process, including staffing, and have anticipated being figurative flooded with permits to review? The alternative is to have yet another time-delaying process imposed on homeowners and builders.

Recovery from the floods will take a long time. How many communities have thought about critical staff that will experience dramatically increased workloads? They will be working long hours and under a great deal of stress. Have the communities planned for this since we know it will happen. Are they prepared to provide assistance for critical employee’s families—help with living arrangements, schooling and other life necessities?

Utilities will need to be restored. Electric companies are excellent examples of resilient thinking in that many have reciprocal agreements with other companies. Equipped workers will come from far and wide to help restore systems. But how many community water systems or gas systems have similar agreements?

The flooding comes at a bad time—toward the end of the school year. Have communities thought about perhaps extending schools into the summer so parents can attend to rebuilding? Or, perhaps having day-camp programs for those who need them?

Disasters always surprise us in that things happen that were not anticipated. However, many things can be predicted, and resilient thinking attends to these to make recovery as smooth and quick as possible.

Warren Edwards

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.

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.

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