Photo Credit: This RAND Corporation infographic conveys a great deal of information about community resilience theory and practice.
I’m always on the lookout for resilience resources, and the Twitter search phrases that most consistently produce resources that I find helpful in my job are “disaster resilience” and “community resilience.” Over the past year or so, tweets have directed me to dozens of organizations, publications and programs related to improving disaster resilience in communities around the world. Below are some of my favorites.
About the Torrens Resilience Institute
The Torrens Resilience Institute exists “to improve the capacity of organizations and societies to respond to disruptive challenges which have the potential to overwhelm local disaster management capabilities and plans.” This website has a lot of useful resources, including a community resilience toolkit and scorecard that was a source of inspiration for the FAC Self-Assessment Tool.
First Things First: Defining Resilience
The Torrens Resilience Institute in Adelaide, Australia explains the origins and evolution of the term “resilience.” The diagram below, courtesy of the Torrens Resilience Institute, is a nice way to convey what many of us mean by “resilience.”
The non-profit RAND Corporation, a policy research institution, defines community resilience as “a measure of the sustained ability of a community to utilize available resources to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations.”
This is a useful depiction of Resilience. courtesy of the Torrens Resilience Institute.
Why is Resilience Important?
In her new book The Resilience Dividend, Judith Rodin states “building resilience is one of our most urgent social and economic issues because we live in a world that is defined by disruption.” Rodin is president of the Rockefeller Foundation, which launched the 100 Resilient Cities Initiative a few years ago. I haven’t read the book yet, but I do subscribe to the 100 Resilient Cities blog.
With respect to fire, many academics and others are also looking at wildland fire issues through a resilience lens. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading this new paper by Moritz et al. titled “Learning to Coexist with Fire.” Figure 1 is titled “Links and pathways to resilience in coupled socioecological systems affected by fire.”
Community Resilience Training
Volunteering Queensland has a project called the Natural Disasters Resilience Leadership Project. The project “is designed to equip community leaders with the knowledge and resources to be better able to build healthy, resilient communities and provide the local leadership needed for community resilience. It assists local leaders by expanding their understanding of community resilience, building their leadership capacity, strengthening their networks and connecting them with local agencies and authorities.”
Who wants to go to Queensland with me and check this out? In all seriousness, I think this training strategy is a great idea.
I recently learned that the RAND Corporation has an online course intended to help people build resilient communities. I’ve also used RAND resilience infographics in FAC Network presentations.
This RAND Corporation infographic conveys a great deal of information about community resilience theory and practice.
It seems to me that the FAC Learning Network and the larger FAC practitioner community are part of a global community resilience movement that is doing some really important work.
Please share your thoughts about these resources and also some of your favorite resources in the comments section below.
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Thanks for sharing these resources Wendy. The Resilience Alliance http://www.resalliance.org also has some great resources, including a resilience assessment workbook that may be similar to the toolkit and scorecard you described above. I’m glad to see resilience concepts being put into practice through the FAC Learning Network.