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.
Resilient communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from natural and man-made disasters. RAND experts offer expertise on evaluating and implementing community resilience–building activities throughout the world.
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.
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.
Communities can build resilience to disasters through efforts such as joint planning of government and non-governmental organizations and the development of community networks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Considers proposals to augment the existing flood-damage protection system in New Orleans with ''nonstructural'' risk mitigation programs focused on single-family homes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Practical recommendations for attracting new recruits and retaining serving officers in the post-Katrina New Orleans Police Department.
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.
Linking Sustainable Community Activities to Pollution Prevention: A Sourcebook
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