This article was originally written in 2022 by Alan Propp, and is republished with the author’s permission.
Growing up, I loved thunderstorms. I marveled at the rain that pounded my roof and the bolts of lightning that illuminated my window. My family was lucky, and privileged, to feel safe inside infrastructure and a built environment designed to protect us from these weather events.
Today, working in local government, I feel twinges of anxiety when a storm hits. I now know that our urban environment was built for yesterday’s limits, not today’s climate crisis-induced extremes. Storms increasingly demand resilience against impacts for which we have not prepared.
The toll of Hurricane Ian — over 100 fatalities, $66B in damage, and untold additional psychological cost — capped a summer marked by houses falling into a Yellowstone river and thousands losing drinking water from a Jackson, Mississippi storm, highlighting the gap between preparation and reality.
When extreme storms like these hit, where would you turn for aid? White, wealthy communities like the one in which I grew up, for whom public institutions have worked for centuries, may turn to their local government — information from their mayor or Councilmember. Frontline, low-income communities for whom government trust has never been earned and who are likely to feel a disaster’s worst impacts may be more likely to turn to more hyper-local institutions with trusted faces they know — churches, schools, community centers.
Resilience hubs present an opportunity to address this intersection of climate-induced weather extremes and government mistrust. These institutions can link governments and front-line communities in a manner that can begin to rebuild eroded trust and protect communities from the impacts of climate change in an era that desperately demands it.
Defining Resilience Hubs
Resilience hubs take different forms uniquely tailored to their host communities. The Urban Sustainability Directors Network defines them broadly as “community-serving facilities augmented to support residents, coordinate communication, distribute resources, and reduce carbon pollution while enhancing the quality of life.” In practice, they can be housed in anything from a government-owned community recreation center to a private business or church.
Unlike traditional emergency response, resilience hubs operate consistently. They share basic characteristics, including relationship-building and community-preparedness programs, physical features that safeguard the facility, and backup power to facilitate operations and communications in all conditions. During everyday conditions, they may offer programming from job training and food distribution to music and theater.
That familiarity puts the hubs front of mind during disaster conditions, in which they become backup-power-generated sources of supplies, food, and information distribution. They remain the go-to during recovery times, helping families get back on their feet before returning to everyday programs.
One promising example comes from right here in Washington, DC. Instead of a traditionally top-down governmental approach of identifying a threatened area (in this case, Watts Branch Stream) and proposing a solution to address the threat (flooding), DC’s Department of Energy and Environment instead assembled a group of community residents and leaders to understand their needs. Members of this Equity Advisory Group were paid to participate in these conversations and provided transportation reimbursement, childcare, and meals for their time and input. Conversations over several months surfaced that the community considered climate risks like flooding less important than issues like food access and public safety.
The committee decided to address these issues through a resilience hub. The F.H. Faunteroy Community Enrichment Center (FCEC) integrates food literacy lessons and an industrial kitchen with on-site health education and workforce training to address poverty. When the pandemic struck, the FCEC shifted its focus to mask-making and distribution to seniors and families in need. During gun violence emergencies, the FCEC acts as a mustering point. By tailoring its services to community needs rather than strictly focusing on climate change, the FCEC integrates climate education programming with other pressing concerns, strengthening trust in government in the process. While this work is funded by the local and federal government, the decision-making and power sit in the community’s hands.
Resisting Scalability
While the private sector often obsesses over scalability, community resilience hubs strive for the opposite approach. Rather than replicating “scalable” solutions, resilience hubs are tailored to their community through extensive engagement to address their unique challenges. A resilience hub in an extreme heat-threatened Tempe, AZ neighborhood without cooling centers will look different from one in a winter freeze-impacted Austin, TX community requiring backup heating. Even within Baltimore’s network of 17 resilience hubs, each facility is unique in its daily existence as a church, community center, or non-profit. They are united primarily by their connection to Baltimore’s Office of Sustainability and by the trust they have built over years with their immediate communities.
An Overlooked and Underfunded Solution
It is this resistance to simple replicability that makes resilience hubs so effective — and the reason why building them across the US will not be cheap. The practice of deep community engagement requires time, money, and commitment to ensure broad, participatory design. In steady-state operation, each hub requires consistent funding for constituent-specific programming, training, retrofitting, backup power, and community resources.
But community resilience hubs can pay dividends. Beyond the financial benefits of workforce development, food access, and reduced emergency response burden they provide, they are invaluable in improving ties between governments and front-line residents during everyday conditions and reducing the human lives lost during disaster conditions. Compared to the alternative, they are a bargain.
Local governments must therefore prioritize funding to build out community resilience hubs tailored to their needs. Federal funding through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act offers an unprecedented opportunity for local governments to double down on their commitment to protect vulnerable residents and begin to rebuild decades of mistrust. Existing community centers, privately and publicly owned, are ripe for activation in every city, and residents can help their governments identify and adapt such institutions
Government-supported, community-led climate adaptation solutions can be beautiful examples of what collective democracy looks like. With time, money, and thoughtfulness, community resilience hubs could be the decentralized solution to meet the moment, ensuring that everyone feels the security during storms that I felt growing up.
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