Abstract
Measurement is a community endeavor that can enhance the ability to anticipate, withstand, and recover from a disaster, as well as foster learning and adaptation. This project’s purpose was to develop a self-assessment toolkit—manifesting a bottom-up, participatory approach—that enables people to envision community resilience as a concrete, desirable, and obtainable goal; organize a cross-sector effort to evaluate and enhance factors that influence resilience; and spur adoption of interventions that, in a disaster, would lessen impacts, preserve community functioning, and prompt a more rapid recovery. In 2016–2018, we engaged in a process of literature review, instrument development, stakeholder engagement, and local field-testing, to produce a self-assessment toolkit (or “rubric”) built on the Composite of Post-Event Well-being (COPEWELL) model that predicts post-disaster community functioning and resilience. Co-developing the rubric with community-based users, we generated self-assessment instruments and process guides that localities can more readily absorb and adapt. Applied in three field tests, the Social Capital and Cohesion materials equip users to assess this domain at different geo-scales. Chronicling the rubric’s implementation, this account sheds further light on tensions between community resilience assessment research and practice, and potential reasons why few of the many current measurement systems have been applied.
Highlights
Reasons to reform society’s relationship to the environment continue to accumulate: a changing, increasingly volatile climate; more frequent disasters and disease outbreaks; and a population growing in number and income inequality [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Phase 1 review of existing self-assessment tools suggested that the new rubric would add value by providing communities a novel way of thinking about resistance, recovery, and resilience and by combining social, natural, and physical elements into a comprehensive picture where other resilience assessment tools have tipped the scales either to social or physical factors [23,24]
The COPEWELL model, upon which the rubric’s framework is based, recognizes community functioning domains that need to remain uninterrupted in a disaster
Summary
Reasons to reform society’s relationship to the environment continue to accumulate: a changing, increasingly volatile climate; more frequent disasters and disease outbreaks; and a population growing in number and income inequality [1,2,3,4,5,6]. In this severe context, practitioners, policymakers, and affected communities have converged around the notion of “community resilience,” recognizing that they cannot sustain a business-as-usual outlook and they need to take a more proactive approach to reducing risks [7]. Public Health 2019, 16, 2372; doi:10.3390/ijerph16132372 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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