Systematic Initiatives That Impact the Whole-community Approach to Resiliency
Abstract
This presentation discusses the need to incorporate the public as part of an inclusive system to achieve successful community resilience outcomes. A successful program must include the critical private and nonprofit partners in addition to federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial agencies to truly increase a community’s resilience and commitment to developing a hazard-aware and thriving population. Just as emergency response begins and ends at the local level, so should initiatives to spur successful resilience. However, a bottom-up approach is too often stifled by the complexity and general restrictions of government-centric systems that are either too inflexible, specifically restricting private partners, or unnecessarily complex, making it difficult to support grassroots motivations to rebound from disaster recovery through mitigation efforts. This paper evaluates ongoing challenges within government preparedness and mitigation programs to create resilience opportunities in our communities, as well as presenting positive shifts in public-private collaboration to utilize bottom-up intervention to stimulate the development, implementation, and sustainment of resilience outcomes. By linking all parts of the whole-community system, we can better identify specific needs, policies, practices, and responsibilities that will allow individual communities to build their capacity for resilience.
Keywords
Whole Community, Resilience, systems, coordination and collaboration
Systematic Initiatives That Impact the Whole-community Approach to Resiliency
This presentation discusses the need to incorporate the public as part of an inclusive system to achieve successful community resilience outcomes. A successful program must include the critical private and nonprofit partners in addition to federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial agencies to truly increase a community’s resilience and commitment to developing a hazard-aware and thriving population. Just as emergency response begins and ends at the local level, so should initiatives to spur successful resilience. However, a bottom-up approach is too often stifled by the complexity and general restrictions of government-centric systems that are either too inflexible, specifically restricting private partners, or unnecessarily complex, making it difficult to support grassroots motivations to rebound from disaster recovery through mitigation efforts. This paper evaluates ongoing challenges within government preparedness and mitigation programs to create resilience opportunities in our communities, as well as presenting positive shifts in public-private collaboration to utilize bottom-up intervention to stimulate the development, implementation, and sustainment of resilience outcomes. By linking all parts of the whole-community system, we can better identify specific needs, policies, practices, and responsibilities that will allow individual communities to build their capacity for resilience.
