Community resilience is a measure of the sustained ability of a community to utilize available resources to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations. RAND has implemented and evaluated community resilience-building activities worldwide and identified opportunities to integrate the non-profit and for-profit sectors in public health and emergency preparedness, infrastructure protection, and the development of economic recovery programs.
Project
FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program writes the vast majority of flood insurance on residential properties in the United States; current legislation includes a number of reforms that could strengthen the program. RAND has completed studies in four key areas that offer insight into the issues under consideration.
Multimedia
In this Resilient Communities podcast, Jennifer Steele discusses the differences in policies and practices between charter and traditional schools in New Orleans, where charter-based reform spread in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Multimedia
In this Resilient Communities podcast, Jordan R. Fischbach discusses recent research that has helped the city of New Orleans address the challenge of reducing flood risk and is relevant to many other coastal communities that are concerned with water resources, infrastructure planning, rising sea levels, and flooding.
Journal Article
Community resilience (CR) is emerging as a major public policy priority within disaster management and is one of two key pillars of the Dec. 2009 US National Health Security Strategy.
Multimedia
In this Resilient Communities podcast, Admiral Thad Allen discusses the critical questions confronting the field of community resilience as well as a new toolkit developed by RAND researchers to support community disaster planning.
Tool
The Promising Practices Network has developed an emergency planning guide that presents high-priority preparedness activities and documents to help child-serving organizations customize their emergency plans.
Project
Recent proposed reforms to the Stafford Act (improving disaster recovery capability) and the National Disaster Recovery Framework (a guide to cooperation between federal agencies) cluster around five key areas where RAND has relevant studies offering additional insight and context.
Research Brief
Describes how nonstructural measures -- such as incentives for home elevation, incentives for relocation to lower-risk areas, and restrictions on the use of floodplain land -- can make New Orleans less vulnerable to storm surge.
Multimedia
In light of Congress's upcoming discussion about reauthorization of the Pandemic All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA), five RAND experts discuss, in this August 2011 Congressional Briefing, the significant ways in which the U.S. public health system has improved since 9/11, as well as areas to which future improvement efforts should be targeted.
Multimedia
In this July 2011 Congressional Briefing, Lois Davis discusses adjustments made by law enforcement agencies to strengthen their counterterrorism and homeland security capabilities, and the new funding challenges faced by police departments since 9/11.
Commentary
If the U.S. does not improve its ability to track federal spending and develop reliable measures of effectiveness, precious federal disaster aid will continue to be at risk of being squandered, writes Agnes Gereben Schaefer.
Report
Many programs are available to encourage and support psychological resilience among service members and families but little is known about their effectiveness. A focused literature review identifies evidence-informed factors for promoting psychological resilience and a basis for evaluating military resilience programs.
Research Brief
The composition of households in New Orleans made the city's families more vulnerable to breakup during the chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina. Two-thirds of the city's households at that time saw at least one family member move away, an unusually high number even given the tremendous destruction of the hurricane.
Report
NGOs are instrumental in communities' resilience to natural and man-made disasters, but the plans and processes for their involvement are not well-defined. RAND-convened sessions at the 2010 LANO conference identified challenges to engaging NGOs and recommendations for addressing these challenges.
Report
Communities can build resilience to disasters through efforts such as joint planning of government and non-governmental organizations and the development of community networks.
Report
Five years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, neither the federal government nor the private sector is any closer to developing effective solutions to the problems facing flood and windstorm insurance.
Report
Haiti's future prosperity and peace depend on its ability to build a more resilient state, one capable of providing public services like education and health care as well as responding effectively to natural disasters.
Multimedia
This web-based mapping tool from RAND can help health care decisionmakers in Missouri identify community-level hotspots where suboptimal health care exists, in particular when it is related to low health literacy.
Tool
The new Displaced New Orleans Residents Survey examines the current location, well-being, and plans of people who lived in the City of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005.
Report
This report describes a method for modeling an emergency response system; identifying how individual parts of the system might fail; and assessing the likelihood of each failure and the severity of its effects on the overall response effort.
RAND® is a registered trademark. Copyright © 1994-2013 RAND Corporation.