From Concept to Action: Actively Engaging Communities in Building Disaster Resilience

Background/purpose. Community resilience is rapidly emerging as the primary, overarching target of public health programs throughout the nation, yet within communities themselves the term resilience can be difficult to concretize.  Understanding the concept to becoming resilient is different from traditional preparedness. Some public health agencies are challenged by how to communicate the concept of resilience with communities. Successful approaches to building community resilience must facilitate operationalizing the concept of resilience into the social fabric of communities through routine activities.

Methods: The Los Angeles County Community Disaster Resilience Project (LACCDR) leveraged Loma Linda University's existing toolkit and adapted it with core ideas about resilience surfaced through LACCDR community surveys and workgroups.  The new toolkit incorporates four levers of resilience as identified by Chandra et al. in 2011 to explicitly guide the framework of resilience throughout the sections. The toolkit and community engagement model were implemented in 8 community coalitions across LA County.

Results: Responses to sections of the toolkit have been very positive as they learned more about what resilience is and how to help strengthen their communities. The hands on practice-based learning approach used by the toolkit resonated well with participants. Challenges were faced in maintaining interest among local communities and agencies during the development phase.

Conclusion: The use of CBPR to develop and implement disaster resilience building practice-based curricula helped to create co-ownership and buy-in on the topic and approach among community members and partner organizations; demonstrating the importance of informed and participatory community engagement throughout resilience building process.