National and global efforts have failed to stop climate change, transition from fossil fuels, and reduce inequality. We must now confront these and other increasingly complex problems by building resilience at the community level. The Community Resilience Reader combines a fresh look at the challenges humanity faces in the 21st century, the essential tools of resilience science, and the wisdom of activists, scholars, and analysts working on the ground to present a new vision for creating resilience. It shows that resilience is a process, not a goal; how it requires learning to adapt but also preparing to transform; and that it starts and ends with the people living in a community. From Post Carbon Institute, the producers of the award-winning The Post Carbon Reader, The Community Resilience Reader is a valuable resource for community leaders, college students, and concerned citizens.

This book provides an alternative perspective on community resilience, drawing on critical sociological and social policy insights about how people individually and collectively cope with different kinds of adversity. Based on the idea that resilience is more than simply an invention of neoliberal governments, this book explores diverse expressions of resilience and considers what supports and undermines people’s resilience in different contexts. Focusing on the United Kingdom, it examines the contradictions and limitations of neoliberal resilience policies and the role of policy in shaping how vulnerabilities are distributed and how resilience is manifested. The book explores different types of resilience including planning, response, recovery, adaptation and transformation, which are examined in relation to different types of threat such as financial hardship, disasters and climate change. It argues that resilience cannot act as an antidote to vulnerability, and aims to demonstrate the importance of shared institutions in underpinning resilience and in preventing socially created vulnerabilities. It will be of interest to academics, students and well-informed practitioners working with the concept of resilience within the subject areas of Sociology, Social Policy, Human Geography, Environmental Humanities and International Development.

This book discusses the resilience of communities in both developed and developing world contexts. It investigates the notion of ‘resilience’ and the challenges faced by local communities around the world to deal with disturbances (natural hazards or human-made) that may threaten their long-term survival. Using global examples, specific emphasis is placed on how learning processes, traditions, policies and politics affect the resilience of communities and what constraints and opportunities exist for communities to raise resilience levels.

Resilience is a community's ability to withstand and quickly recover from disasters and other hazardous events. This comprehensive guide to community resilience for state and local officials, disaster relief organizations, and concerned attorneys and community members encapsulates the ABA's commitment to promoting community resilience as set forth in Resolution 108, which is included as an appendix.

Told through the voices of local community leaders, this book analyzes how communities respond to natural disasters and how outsiders contribute positively - or negatively - to their response, promoting debate on the role of aid and the media in times of crisis.

In the United States, people of color are disproportionally more likely to live in environments with poor air quality, in close proximity to toxic waste, and in locations more vulnerable to climate change and extreme weather events. In many vulnerable neighborhoods, structural racism and classism prevent residents from having a seat at the table when decisions are made about their community. In an effort to overcome power imbalances and ensure local knowledge informs decision-making, a new approach to community engagement is essential. In Resilience for All, Barbara Brown Wilson looks at less conventional, but often more effective methods to make communities more resilient. She takes an in-depth look at what equitable, positive change through community-driven design looks like in four communities—East Biloxi, Mississippi; the Lower East Side of Manhattan; the Denby neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan; and the Cully neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. These vulnerable communities have prevailed in spite of serious urban stressors such as climate change, gentrification, and disinvestment. Wilson looks at how the lessons in the case studies and other examples might more broadly inform future practice. She shows how community-driven design projects in underserved neighborhoods can not only change the built world, but also provide opportunities for residents to build their own capacities.

The frequency and severity of disasters over the last few decades have presented unprecedented challenges for communities across the United States. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina exposed the complexity and breadth of a deadly combination of existing community stressors, aging infrastructure, and a powerful natural hazard. In many ways, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was a turning point for understanding and managing disasters, as well as related plan making and policy formulation. It brought the phrase "community resilience" into the lexicon of disaster management. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program summarizes the existing portfolio of relevant or related resilience measurement efforts and notes gaps and challenges associated with them. It describes how some communities build and measure resilience and offers four key actions that communities could take to build and measure their resilience in order to address gaps identified in current community resilience measurement efforts. This report also provides recommendations to the Gulf Research Program to build and measure resilience in the Gulf of Mexico region.