How to Build Community Resilience

Inside My Canoehead

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Resilience is the 21st century emergency management (EM) buzzword, every initiative is grounded in the theory, flavoured for the desired outcomes, but linked to the overall concept of a capability and capacity to navigate through and emerge from an exogenous shock leveraging only internal resources. A generalist definition, but one that retains all the elements of a series of theoretical and practical language models. Simply put, can what we designate as a tribe make it through our risk profile without needing external assistance?

Community resilience has been the focus of a decade of research, both personally by our staff and as a corporation. We've endeavoured to both challenge the paradigm and to develop the operationalization of the theoretical concepts. As an academic, I am a fan of peer reviewed articles, but left to their own, they offer little for the community of practice. Necessarily vague, academic articles provide insight into variable association and what this means for generally accepted principles and where future studies should move the goalposts. Excellent and necessary. However, what EM requires at the local level, as all disasters are local, are the 14 specific ordered steps necessary to create community resilience from zero to hero. That specificity is not present in journals, nor should it be, but that remains the focus of our efforts, to deliver the exacting process a municipal EM agency can execute.
We argue that community resilience is a by-product of a number of increased capabilities and capacities. By increasing the preparedness of a community, you increase resilience. By expanding and deepening social capital in a community, you increase resilience. By strengthening the cross-sphere (civil, private, public NGO) coordination & cooperation, you increase resilience. Our position remains that resilience is built through the identification of variables correlated in academic literature and then executing practical initiatives to increase their presence and strength. Each of these lines of resilience influences will require locally influenced approaches, but remain grounded in identical principles.

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