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.
Report
Researchers assessing a disaster case management pilot recommend that future efforts establish better ways to find affected residents, consider needs/vulnerabilities in planning, and ensure continuity of services before, during, and after disaster.
Multimedia
Describes a web-based mapping tool to help healthcare decisionmakers identify neighborhood-level ''hotspots'' of suboptimal health or healthcare that may be due to low health literacy.
Report
Considers proposals to augment the existing flood-damage protection system in New Orleans with ''nonstructural'' risk mitigation programs focused on single-family homes.
Research Brief
Stakeholders in communities in which health care access was disrupted by Hurricane Katrina were engaged in an assessment of health priorities, as well as in data interpretation and plan design, to produce a sustainable community-academic partnership.
Commentary
Previous efforts by the international community to stabilize Haiti have met with little or only short-term success. This time, following the earthquake, the U.S. response could actually leverage the response and recovery opportunities into a broader international plan, write Agnes Gereben Schaefer and Anita Chandra.
Journal Article
This commentary argues that unless the U.S. examines and plans for the psychological consequences of disasters such as Katrina and the recent oil spill, communities will be struggling to address acute and chronic health issues while trying to rebuild.
Commentary
Four years after Hurricane Katrina, many people in the Gulf Coast region are still "just surviving," struggling with the economic devastation and the physical and psychological toll of these kinds of disasters, write Anita Chandra and Joie Acosta.
Report
Changing emergency planning rules to make nongovernmental organizations a key component of recovery efforts could get them involved earlier and speed the full recovery of communities after disaster strikes.
Tool
Presents a toolkit and a Web-based Geographic Information Systems tool meant to help state and local public health agencies improve their emergency preparedness activities for special needs populations.
Report
Decisionmakers today largely assess emergency preparedness and homeland security "in the rear view mirror," looking at performance in actual events and responding to perceived failures. While real-world experience is important, better ways to assess preparedness prospectively will lead to better choices as to how and where to strengthen it.
Report
New training manuals provide a curricula that can be used to train hospital and clinic staff as well as department of mental health staff on how to prepare for and respond to the psychological consequences of large-scale disasters.
Research Brief
This research brief summarizes a study that found that the private insurance industry underwrites residential flood insurance in a limited but important niche, protecting more homes, responding to lender and borrower needs, and reducing lender costs.
Report
The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) provides the majority of flood insurance on U.S. residential properties. This report provides information about the size of the private flood insurance market and compares private with NFIP policies.
Report
The efforts undertaken by civilian and military organizations in response to Hurricane Katrina were historically unprecedented, but a number of steps can be taken to enhance future Army and National Guard disaster-response efforts.
Report
Practical recommendations for attracting new recruits and retaining serving officers in the post-Katrina New Orleans Police Department.
Report
The vast majority of the 200,000 Louisiana students displaced from their public schools by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita missed weeks or more of school, and most did not return to their original schools by the end of the 2005-06 school year. As a result, many may experience long-term academic problems.
Journal Article
Terrorism insurance policy may be an important element of the strategy against terrorism, particularly as terrorists increasingly focus on economic targets.
Periodical
Given the continuing threat of terrorist activity in the United States, it is important for U.S. leaders to promote a national sense of psychological resilience.
Report
Linking Sustainable Community Activities to Pollution Prevention: A Sourcebook
People
Behavioral Scientist; Affiliated Faculty, Pardee RAND Graduate School
Ph.D. in community and cultural psychology, University of Hawai'i
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