An Overview Of Our Solution
As the World embraces the fact that more than half its population now live in cities, we must come to terms with the fact that in many cases these new urban residents have moved to large metropolitan centers that are vulnerable to extreme weather. From storm surges that flood subway systems to extreme temperature events that are heightened by “heat island” effect, our urban and suburban residents are facing a future of more intense and unpredictable atmospheric events. For many this reality is survivable, but for those often described as vulnerable (i.e. the very young, seniors and those living with access / functional needs) these events can be debilitating if not fatal. San Francisco is taking this challenge head on by deploying a systemic approach to empowering communities to care for each other during these times of stress through an emerging network of Neighborhood Support Centers.
- Population Impacted: 850,000 +
- Continent: North America
Address
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett, room 362
San Francisco, CA 94102
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
Over the last seven years, the NEN has been prototyping a collective impact approach called the Empowered Communities Program (ECP) that offers community leaders unprecedented access to technical, programming and financial resources that in turn nurture their desire to convene and draft culturally competent Resilience Action Plans. Once a neighborhood enrolls in the ECP, the NEN organizes government, non-profit, academic and private sector actors who can contribute to a community’s planning and implementation needs. Over the next two months, the NEN works to educate the local leadership about their risk hazard assessment and support them as they craft a community engagement strategy. This engagement is centered on five meetings, featuring human center design activities, that allow residents to self-identify what their goals and objectives are in the mitigation, preparedness, response, restoration and recovery phases of an extreme weather event. These outputs are inventoried in the community’s Resilience Action Plan along with vision and mission statements, a governance model and inventories of nearby assets. The final step is to draft and implement an annual program plan that is tied to the goals of the Resilience Action Plan. In order to incent their ongoing investment, the NEN is now securing resilience action grants that communities can use to implement the projects that they create. A key element of their resilience strategy is the development of a Neighborhood Support Center (NSC), which acts as a decision making platform for the community during times of stress. Leveraging the Incident Command System, the NSC affords residents with an organized venue to inventory immediate needs and resources so they can engage and support their most vulnerable neighbors until first responders are on scene. After the event, the NSC can stay active and support the community as it advances through the restoration and recovery phases.
Describe Your Solution
The NEN’s Empowered Communities Program (ECP) has been incubated with the inputs from the most respected minds in the disaster resilience space, as well as by community residents who have been through severe weather events. As a result, the ECP advances a few simple narratives that help us connect with our partners and keep our work grounded. “Everybody Lives – Everybody Stays” Often, disaster management organizations advance the need to take responsibility for one’s safety during a disaster. The reality is that there are residents that are simply unable to negotiate the disruption of lifeline services without the support of their neighbors. The ECP helps communities anticipate this responsibility and plan accordingly. “Plan with People, not for them” For decades, residents have had their disaster “plan” written for them on their behalf down at City Hall. In fact, all too often it’s a plan that encompasses the whole city and does not take into consideration the unique cultural composition and risk hazards of their neighborhood. The ECP is a place based planning system that brings residents together to learn about their unique condition and create strategies that they feel best fits their neighborhood. In some cases, the people who are most vulnerable to extreme weather events are at the table sharing with their community how they’d like to be supported. “Train for tomorrow, but working together today” A great deal of research has shown that communities that are able to work together at the local level across all sectors are better positioned to collaborate in times of stress. With that, the NEN encourages its partner communities to use the systems and approaches they learn through the ECP deployment every day to not only build a stronger community, but to also strengthen their interoperability and sense of trust and reciprocity.
Economic?
In two of our neighborhoods, stakeholders from the small business community have been key members of the ECP leadership team. With their participation, the resilience action plans have strong and detailed language about the important role the private sector plays in all phases of the disaster. As a result, the design / assembly and exercising of their Neighborhood Support Center calls for the business community’s participation. It is hoped that this pre-event integration will accelerate the restoration of key services and employment opportunities post-event.
Environmental?
Often the essential role the environment plays in mitigation, response, restoration and recovery phases of a disaster are overlooked. In fact the experience of the Vietnamese Community in New Orleans shows very clearly how the overall health and economic viability are deeply impacted by environmental policy during times of stress and recovery. The Bayview community in San Francisco has been working for decades to mitigate the impact of the legacy from the nearby Naval shipyard and has already called out that it wants to be sure that debris removal and health issues related to extreme weather does not disproportionally impact their neighbors.
What were the negative or unintended impacts (if any) associated with implementing this solution?
To date, it would be hard to identify negative outcomes from an ECP deployment. In some cases, neighborhoods were unable to establish a governance structure that allowed them to implement the system; however, in the effort of attempting this task, the community still advanced its resilience. As for unintended impacts, there have been some surprising outcomes which have strengthen the ECP offering. In the Bayview neighborhood, the community has determined that they want to advance economic opportunity through their resilience efforts. As a result they have created a Climate Change Leadership Academy and have received funding to train at risk youth on this important issue and hire them to do the asset mapping for the creation of the local Neighborhood Support Center. In Miraloma Park, the neighborhood association had never really used electronic communication platforms, such as Constant Contact, and as a result of their outreach for the community meetings, now have a meaningful new way to reach out to the new families moving into the neighborhood. These examples demonstrate how the ECP’s ability to offer communities a flexible platform to define and implement their own goals for advancing their collective resilience.
Return on Investment: How much did it cost to implement these activities? How do your results above compare to this investment?
Dollar for dollar, the ECP may be one of the most cost effective disaster resilience programs to date. Launched during one of the worst economic crisis of our Country’s history, the NEN management team had to design and implement the ECP with little or no direct budget. By leveraging cross sector partnerships, service learning by University students, existing programs and grants, the ECP offers its partner communities a robust set of resources as well as allows the NEN team to easily engage new neighborhoods and sustain our existing partnerships without needing large new streams of funding. In regards to ROI, the outputs to date have been remarkable, if not inspirational. Our first ECP community that launched in 2007 is still up and running and most recently new neighborhoods are approaching us about consideration for deployment. Within the existing ECP partner communities their ongoing participation and generation of resilience action plans, with accompanying annual plans, gives us great confidence that we are generating returns that are both quantitative and qualitative. Today the annual budget for the ECP is roughly three hundred thousand dollars a year for staff.
What are the main factors needed to successfully replicate this solution
Early on in the ECP’s development, Mayor Lee charged the management team to make sure that the program worked not only in San Francisco but in all of the surrounding cities as well. He advanced this goal because San Francisco’s economic resilience relies on the eight hundred thousand plus people who commute in every day for work and generate payroll and sales taxes. With that charge, the NEN team set out to leverage resources and institutions that most cities have already. Non-profits, faith based and academic institutions, government, private sector and community groups are all common municipal assets across the American neighborhood landscape. Over the course of its development, the NEN learned a great deal from communities grappling with recovery. Today the NEN has been engaged by cities, such as Boston, Toronto, Los Angeles, Boulder, Washington DC and Oakland, who have expressed interest in deploying the system and in some cases have either flown out to San Francisco for briefings or flown NEN team members to their municipality to present.