Report on a model community resilience program

CES - Neighborhood Resilience : Florida Atlantic University - Center for Environmental Studies

In the Summer of 2019, researchers at the FAU Center for Environmental Studies (CES) collaborated with Jan Booher of Heron Bridge Education, LLC on a resilience mapping initiative in Broward County, Florida. The goal of this collaboration was to bring to light the many complex factors and processes at play within communities, and within the Estates of Fort Lauderdale community specifically, that work to contribute to community resilience to environmental hazards including flooding, extreme wind and extreme heat.

Reputable census-based vulnerability and resilience assessments such as the Social Vulnerability Index (SoVi) and the Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC) offered an important conceptual foundation for this study. Utilizing the BRIC indicators and framework as a point of departure, this study serves to examine the roles that locally tailored BRIC indicators and dimension types play in shaping resilience within Broward County communities.

The community selection process for this study consisted of a combination of key gatekeeper meetings and spatial vulnerability assessments of various communities within Broward County that were experiencing environmental hazards and had an interest in examining and improving their resilience. Eventually, the Estates of Fort Lauderdale community emerged as the first most conducive and most accessible community with which CES would work. 

“We are experiencing hazards at an alarming rate that communities need to be prepared to address.”

Jan Booher, Heron Bridge Education, LLC

The project began with a series of listening sessions and training sessions which served to engage community members and build the community capacity necessary for a successful and strong collaboration. The partnership nature of these interactions helped to build trust and buy-in from community members. Moreover, it allowed their voices and experience to shape the survey instrument for the study and the study process, as community members led the way in the data collection process and assisted with data input.

Community members helped to administer household-level surveys composed of questions that touched upon the seven major resilience dimensions highlighted within this study: communication, knowledge, social capital, mobility, infrastructure, institutional efforts and financial independence.The survey in its entirety aimed to uncover the many complexities of, and multidimensional processes within, the community that shape the community’s resilience. Some examples of topics addressed within the survey, and thus analyzed to produce results, included community connectedness, sense of place, preparedness and response efforts, resources provided and shared, and knowledge spread via social events and everyday communication. ...