An Overview Of Our Solution
Floods. Tornadoes. Wildfires. Our communities face ever-worsening natural hazards and survival will require all hands on deck. Most towns prepare for hazards, but emergency responders rarely work with road crews, watershed groups, or churches – and rarely engage the community.
The best way to reduce risk is resilience – the ability for communities to tackle whatever challenges arise. That means preparing for severe weather, updating infrastructure, and protecting key ecosystems. More importantly, it means building local collaboration and social capital and problem-solving together.
Community Resilience Organizations (CROs) are a new pilot program that make resilience everyone’s business. Local teams break down silos by including government, emergency responders, churches, schools, and more. They educate and involve residents, strengthening collaboration around disaster preparedness. Through an annual Day for CROing, the whole community works together on tangible projects such as streambank plantings, distributing emergency preparedness kits, or cleaning out culverts. And then the community celebrates together, helping to build a stronger and safer future.
CROs launched in five Vermont towns in 2014, with more eager to join in 2015.
- Population Impacted: 626,000 (2013 Vermont state population)
- Continent: North America
Address
3272 Rt 14 N
South Royalton, VT 05068
United States
Hazard
Identify the likelihood and frequency of this hazard
Explain how vulnerable the community is to this hazard
List the potential affects of this hazard
Identify how sensitive the community is to these affects
Preparedness Goal
Implementation Actions
CROs teams create a local structure for helping communities come together to build long-term resilience and reduce local risk around a range of natural hazards.
They do this by:
- Involving diverse local leaders from a range of fields. CROs teams include representatives from government, emergency response, churches, schools, watershed groups and more. By working on teams together, these leaders break down silos and learn to work together. By building and leveraging social capital, they can undertake a broader range of tasks.
- Engaging the whole community. CROs teams reach out to neighborhood groups, churches, schools, sports teams, social service programs, committees and clubs. They educate people on resilience and hazards, involving and investing them in concrete projects to reduce their personal risk and community risk.
- Assessing community resilience. CROs towns all complete resilience self-assessments. This collaborative exercise helps each town think and talk critically about how prepared it is for severe storms and other hazards, what it is doing well, and what it needs to do to become more resilient. They repeat the exercise each year to evaluate progress and set new goals.
- Planning tangible, collaborative disaster preparedness projects. Teams identify concrete projects that will help their communities become significantly safer and better prepared. From streambank plantings to culvert cleanouts, emergency kit distribution to green infrastructure development, projects may be tried and true strategies or innovative new ideas. They focus on projects that will benefit from collaboration from multiple groups, departments or interests.
- Hosting an annual Day for CROing. Teams plan, publicize and organize an annual day for the community to come together and complete resilience projects, learn about hazards and resilience efforts, and celebrate and build community. These annual events include work projects, seminars and education, art and creative engagement, potluck dinners and street dances. By making them fun and inspiring, CROs teams engage people who might not otherwise participate.
- Learning about best practices and new techniques. CROs teams from different towns gather once each year at a statewide summit to hear about new strategies, technologies, projects and ideas in disaster preparedness and resilience. They share their best work and take new ideas back to their own communities.
- Leveraging statewide resources and partners. The CROs organization has commitments of support from more than 25 state agencies, statewide non-profit organizations and departments. These organizations are committed to providing support and resources to help local CROs accomplish their mitigation and preparedness projects.
Describe Your Solution
The CROs program reduces risk in three distinct ways:
- Tangible resilience projects are specific action steps that will mitigate hazards, improve emergency preparedness or help the community adapt to climate change. These actions come directly from the town’s FEMA hazard mitigation plan or resilience assessment and have been identified because of their impact on risk reduction. They may be short-term projects like cleaning culverts or planting trees on vulnerable streambanks. They may be longer-term projects like building neighborhood emergency networks or conserving wetlands and floodplains. In all cases, these projects have measurable outcomes and are tied directly to the community’s vulnerability to flooding or other hazards.
- Improving knowledge and collaboration ensures that community leaders and residents understand likely future hazards, understand the importance of preparing for them and working together, and develop the best strategies for reducing risk. Meeting and learning with other teams from around the state ensures that the very best risk reduction strategies – from specific infrastructure improvements to creative community engagement techniques – are spread from team to team.
- Building resilience and community is one of the single most important steps to reducing a community’s risk from flooding and other hazards. Several research studies have shown that communities with strong social capital and ties have significantly lower risk and fewer negative impacts in disaster situations. However well we prepare, disasters are bound to happen. When neighbors know each other and collaborate effectively, they are able to care for each other, solve their own problems and tackle any challenge that comes.
CROs is currently in its first year as a pilot program, so we do not yet have documented outcomes from our pilot towns. But CROs tie together strategies that have been used in numerous Vermont towns, and that have proven to reduce risk and build resilience.
Economic?
Towns that have implemented community building and resilience activities like CROs – and that have completed concrete projects to reduce flood risk – see both short- and long-term economic impacts. In disaster situations, these towns often see reduced flooding, which means less damage to property and community infrastructure. They also tend to recover faster, which means businesses can reopen, employees can get back to work, and tourists continue to come spend money. On top of economic benefits associated with disasters, towns with strong communities and social relationships generally support local businesses, leading to stronger local economies.
Vermont’s Mad River Valley is one strong example. Their Chamber of Commerce quickly built a Facebook page to help residents communicate and organize an emergency response during Tropical Storm Irene. The page was essential to organizing local disaster response and cleaning up damage, but it also attracted attention and thousands of dollars in donations from people across the country. And once Irene was over, the Chamber continued to grow and use the page to celebrate the valley, engage tourists, and boost the local economy.
Environmental?
Environmental protection and remediation actions are central to reducing flood risk in Vermont. Most CROs pilot towns have multiple environmental and climate adaptation projects in their list of priorities and will be organizing community volunteers to tackle them. Actions might include planting trees to stabilize streambanks, increasing green infrastructure and reducing permeable surfaces at town facilities, conserving wetlands or helping residents to build rain barrels or streambank buffers. Impacts will include healthier ecosystems, less pollution and flow from stormwater and runoff, healthier floodplains, decreased erosion, and decreased energy and water use.
The effectiveness of such projects was clearly evident during Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. The Otter Creek runs through the towns of Rutland and Middlebury and swelled to more than 10 feet above normal during Irene. It was disastrous for Rutland, wiping out neighborhoods and roads, because Rutland’s floodplains have significant development and degradation. Significant wetland conservation and remediation along the Otter Creek near Middlebury helped absorb the same floodwaters and protect the town from any major damage. This video from the Conservation Law Foundation tells the story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucb-Y8iipng
What were the negative or unintended impacts (if any) associated with implementing this solution?
Vermont communities are small and active, and the same people tend to volunteer for lots of things. The only negative impact we anticipate from CROs is potential burnout: we are cautious of asking overstretched volunteers to take on more projects and responsibilities. We have structured CROs to avoid this as much as possible. The intent is for CROs to help communities accomplish projects that already need to happen, and to engage more people and organizations in getting work happen.
Return on Investment: How much did it cost to implement these activities? How do your results above compare to this investment?
The return on investment will be significant in communities over time, and even more significant in disaster situations. Peg Elmer, the founder of CROs and a Tropical Storm Irene flood victim, estimated that she received more than $50,000 in donated services and assistance after the storm. That happened because she lived in a town that benefited from strong social connections and emergency networks and was prepared to help respond and rebuild. Residents in the town next door, without those relationships and networks, received very little (if any) aid.
The total cost of damage in Vermont was estimated at between $700 million and $1 billion in 225 municipalities, or an average $4.5 million per town. Much of that damage came from communities like Rutland that have not completed environmental protection and remediation projects. Every town that forms a CROs team and tackles social, economic and environmental mitigation projects could save millions of dollars in future storms.
We are piloting CROs first in Vermont, but are developing a model that can easily expand across the country. As we do this, the cost per community will continue to decline, and the return on investment will continue to magnify.
What are the main factors needed to successfully replicate this solution
In Vermont, we expect this program to scale up quickly as more towns are added each year. We already have a list of more than 5 towns that are interested in adding programs this year. Our extensive network of partner and supporter organizations will help us spread the word, share impacts, and recruit more towns. This program is modeled in part after "Green Up Day" - a longstanding Vermont tradition that encourages each town to organize clean-up activities in the same day each spring. Within 5 years, we hope the Governor or State Legislature will proclaim a similar statewide "Day for CROing" that will encourage all towns to form CROs and carry out activities on the same day each fall, eventually integrating CROs into the culture of the state.
CROs will function just as well for Western communities facing wildfires or for coastal cities dealing with hurricanes, and we also envision replicating the solution in states across the country. We will develop resources and how-to guides that allow other communities in Vermont and beyond to build and evolve their own CROs teams. The model may look different in other places, as it's critical to develop programs that work with local culture. But we expect to provide a framework and resources that will help communities replicate and adapt it everywhere.
We see three critical ingredients to replication:
1. Story capture and sharing. It's essential that we spend time observing and recording what happens in our pilot towns - photographing teams at work, recording actions completed and implemented, gathering quotes and input, and measuring changes in resilience. We'll then need to share those stories broadly, demonstrating the impact of the program. When we expand beyond Vermont, we will need strong partner networks in other states to help spread the word and support growing CROs networks around the country.
2. Resource development. While we anticipate working very closely with towns to help develop CROs in our first few years of the pilot program, we will be unable to work 1 on 1 with communities once the program grows. It will be increasingly important to offer strong resources for towns to take a DIY approach. Those will include things like a resilience self-assessment, template documents and planning resources, ideas for projects and community events, and more.
3. Funding. Early stage funding is essential to helping us complete the two tasks above, which are the keys to replication. It's just as essential for us to help identify future funding sources for towns themselves to complete resilience actions.