The ability of a community to prepare for, respond to, and recover from a natural disaster is a critical piece of resilience. Within these frameworks, increasing priority is being placed on community-based approaches to resilience, where the strength of networks and their sustainability plays a major role in the community’s overall resilience.
NORC at the University of Chicago is working with the American Red Cross to help communities measure and ultimately improve their community-based resilience. Recently, there has been an increased focus on engaging the public and fostering active community participation to improve local resilience to disasters, shifting away from a reliance solely on a top-down federal response following disasters. Among these new initiatives is the American Red Cross’s Community Resilience Pilot project, which aims to develop new capabilities among chapters and new approaches to working with communities around preparedness. Specifically, the goal of the community engagement strategy is to enhance communities’ abilities to work collaboratively under non-emergency circumstances, so they will both be better prepared to minimize destruction and have a network in place to respond. An underlying strategy of this is to enable communities to strengthen existing local knowledge, resources and networks.
Many questions remain unanswered as to how to develop and measure a community’s resilience; the availability of databases for assessing community resilience that measure social, economic, or institutional components remains scarce.
This project focuses on:
- Resilience
• Preparedness
• Response
• Recovery
- Networks
• Community Capacity
• Participation
• Partnership
- Sustainability
• Demonstrated results
• Social factors
Within the framework of this project, NORC is developing these metrics and creating a monitoring and evaluation system to evaluate the effectiveness of disaster preparedness and resilience strategy at the community level.