Rural Community Development Corporation of California

Supporting Disadvantaged Rural Communities

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Rural Resilience Planning Process

 

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
—James Baldwin

What is Community Resilience?

Resilience describes the capacity of communities to function, so that the people living and working in a community– particularly the poor and vulnerable – survive and thrive no matter what stresses or shocks they encounter.

Resilience depends not only on a community’s physical assets, but also its policies, its capacity to meet community needs, the extent of the community’s active involvement, its institutions, and the community’s local available resources.

The Goal of Resilience Planning?

To assess the community’s qualities (assets) and vulnerabilities (impediments to resilience), and to make a road map to the future (resilience planning) based on the identified community needs, through a strong leadership and public participation process.

Why Rural?

To date, resilience planning has focused on urban and metropolitan cities and communities, rather than America’s rural areas, especially in urban-centric states like California. Additionally, most research and case study of resilience planning have focused on specific resilience issues (like infrastructure or economic development) and not general, holistic, community-wide resiliency.

Unlike urban communities, rural towns, villages or unincorporated communities, even those not considered disadvantaged, have significant gaps in capacity. The four capacity gaps most likely to impede resilience and the planning process are local available funds (capital), social capital, local staffing, and local knowledge.

While urban communities have greater capacity, with the economy of scale they possess, rural communities struggle to do what is needed to maintain a community. Little is left to grow a community or plan a future.

To this end, the process outline below is an adaptation of other urban planning processes[i] and one test case in Weed, California. This will likely require additional alterations as other case studies and field tests become available. Consider this a living document that will be updated with more time and experience.

Introduction

To help understand what rural community resilience planning is, it’s helpful to consider the process as a mixture of two other planning processes/subject matters: hazard mitigation and community development.

Hazard Mitigation: can be defined as any sustained action taken to reduce or eliminate the long-term risk to life and property from hazard events. It is an on-going process that occurs before, during, and after disasters and serves to break the cycle of damage and repair in hazardous areas.

Community Development: is the combined and coordinated efforts of diverse and representative group of community members (civic leaders, activists, involved citizens, businesses, NGO’s and professionals) to take collective action and generate solutions (plans) for common problems, building a livable, sustainable community in the process.

Combining the two approaches into community planning will create a process best able to develop a long-term resilience plan for rural communities.

 

Purpose

The process and the tasks below service multiple purposes with secondary benefits. The primary purpose is to have a plan, a road map to a resilient community. A finished plan will allow communities to have a path forward and give incoming civil servants and leaders a direction to work from.

But in addition to this obvious value of a finished resilience plan, the process below is designed to have other benefits. Experience has shown, for example, that while many disadvantaged rural communities complete planning studies, the majority never get implemented. This process has several tasks designed to ensure that the plan will be implemented. The goal of these tasks is to create a process that addresses the capacity issues that must be overcome by disadvantaged communities to increase the chances of implementation.

Additionally, experience tells us that engaging community members is not only very time consuming but can be disruptive to a planning process. This process believes that by engaging the whole community, you not only get a truly holistic view of the community, but with training these engage community member becomes the community’s future volunteers, leaders, and educators.

 

A Few Considerations

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Before and during this process be sure to keep these considerations in mind:

Yes, it does take a village. In other words, rural community resilience planning and implementation cannot be done without the whole village’s involvement. The more involved, the more chances the plan will not only be comprehensive but also supported by many, with potential for greater citizen involvement in the implementation stage.

Be flexible.  A is not always followed by B and then C, so the process is not linear in nature.

Resilience frame of mind helps.  It’s unlikely the community will engage with resilience practice if it’s not clear what the goals and objective are for the process. The more the community members understand resilience and the planning process, the more likely they will participate.

Participation is a good thing.  Diverse, inclusive participation is imperative, so get people to the process and ensure all views and perspective are included. Additionally, this will allow participates to gain knowledge of each other’s views and priorities in the process.

There is more than one way to do resilience planning.  The process needs to be organic and flexible. Each rural community has a different “personality” and resilience processes will need to be flexible enough to adapted.

There is a lack of resources for rural planning. Gaps in capacity must be identified early and planned for.  Solutions must be identified before moving forward as the process could fail to be completed without addressing each resource gap ahead of time.

 

Glossary

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Leadership Team: The Leadership Team should be made up of key government members, and key member of the planning team. This group needs to be able to make decisions and support the planning process. The group will outline the process, name key stakeholders, identify a local nonprofit willing to champion the cause, if available, or develop a new community nonprofit.

Stakeholder Group: In addition to the Leadership Team, the stakeholders are community leaders that represent the key subject matters for the community: education, safety, business, government (including quasi-government), service communities (nonprofits), religious institutions, housing advocates, agricultural workers and farmers.

Community Participation (Citizen Planners):  In addition to the stakeholders, a series of public meetings should be used to present the concept of resilience planning, allow for public input into goals and objectives and comment on the draft plan. Additionally, the city or community may want to include a citizen planners training. Citizen Planners are used to encourage an engaged and informed community.   Community members become agents for change at the local level, and can, in turn, become volunteers for the community organization.

Sphere (Area) of Concern:  This can be the city (community) boundaries, the city Sphere of Influence, or some other area. The Sphere of Concern will be determined at first by the Leadership Team. The map outlined would then be open for changes as the process moves along.

 

Six Phases of the Rural Community Resilience Planning Process

 
Rural community resilience planning can be broken down into six phases. In many ways, this phased process can also be circular. Once ended, it can start again.

Each phase will have a series of tasks to be completed. These tasks are in no order of prioritization or lineation.  As each community and their participants are unique, the process leaves the ordering or prioritizing of the tasks to the individual communities.

The list of tasks is not all inclusive. Additional tasks can be added. Caution should be taken when removing any task, however, as they are designed to help complete the phases.

Also, communities may find they need to go back to an earlier task for revision purposes. For example, the Area of Concern may change as the participants move further into the process. Mapping of significant assets in the community may result in sites/locations needing to be added.

  • Groundwork
  • Getting Started
  • Assessment
  • Determine Goals and Objectives
  • The Plan
  • Implementation


[i] The following urban resilience processes were used as a starting point for developing this rural resilience process. In addition, this process is based on a field test case done in Weed, California.

100 Resilient Cities,
ARUP’s Resilience City Framework, and
JIBC’s Rural Resilience Disaster Planning

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Rural Community Development

Community Development   is a process whereby diverse and representative groups of community members come together to take collective action and generate solutions (plans) for common problems; building livable, sustainable communities in the process.

Rural Community Development   is the above, with an understanding that many rural communities lack the resources and capacity to manage this process without assistance, training, resources, and technical assistance.

Why
Aside from the most important reason (it’s needed), if not for our rural communities who would manage our forests? Who would protect our waterways? Who would put the food on our plates? Who would provide those services travelers expect as they drive the many freeways?

California’s rural communities have, as we all know, very limited resources. The more donations we receive the less community funding we will need. Thank you.

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