Abstract
Public health officials need evidence-based methods for improving community disaster resilience and strategies for measuring results. This methods paper describes how one public health department is addressing this problem. This paper provides a detailed description of the theoretical rationale, intervention design and novel evaluation of the Los Angeles County Community Disaster Resilience Project (LACCDR), a public health program for increasing community disaster resilience. The LACCDR Project utilizes a pretest–posttest method with control group design. Sixteen communities in Los Angeles County were selected and randomly assigned to the experimental community resilience group or the comparison group. Community coalitions in the experimental group receive training from a public health nurse trained in community resilience in a toolkit developed for the project. The toolkit is grounded in theory and uses multiple components to address education, community engagement, community and individual self-sufficiency, and partnerships among community organizations and governmental agencies. The comparison communities receive training in traditional disaster preparedness topics of disaster supplies and emergency communication plans. Outcome indicators include longitudinal changes in inter-organizational linkages among community organizations, community member responses in table-top exercises, and changes in household level community resilience behaviors and attitudes. The LACCDR Project is a significant opportunity and effort to operationalize and meaningfully measure factors and strategies to increase community resilience. This paper is intended to provide public health and academic researchers with new tools to conduct their community resilience programs and evaluation research. Results are not yet available and will be presented in future reports.
Highlights
As disasters increase in scale, frequency, length, and costs worldwide it is apparent that communities cannot rely on national governmental dollars and agencies to ensure effective and comprehensive disaster response and recovery
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Summary
As disasters increase in scale, frequency, length, and costs worldwide it is apparent that communities cannot rely on national governmental dollars and agencies to ensure effective and comprehensive disaster response and recovery. Disasters in urban centers with diverse communities and growing inequalities challenge governmental capabilities to handle the complex social, health, housing, and financial challenges of response and recovery without local, community involvement [1]. In the United States, local health departments and responder agencies have often turned to non-governmental agencies and local community and faith based organizations during disasters for their knowledge of needs, resources and social complexities in the neighborhoods they serve [3,4,5,6]. The sustained ability of a community to withstand and recover from adversity, emphasizes that effective and efficient disaster risk reduction, response and recovery requires a whole of community approach, specifying that partnerships with nongovernmental partners, engagement of local communities and orientation to community self-sufficiency is the foundation of this approach [7]. In the United States, community resilience has become integral to several national directives [9,10], including the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention’s public health emergency preparedness (PHEP) cooperative agreements [11] and the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) “Whole of Community
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