Developing a Whole-Community Resilience Benchmark: A CommitmentResilience is the ability of a community to positively adapt to change. This means anticipating the future and acting to mitigate potential harm while preparing to seize the opportunities inherent in turbulence and change. There currently is no practical, easily understandable way for communities to know their strengths, weaknesses or trajectories and therefore no way for them to gauge their resilience. With no understanding… Show more Developing a Whole-Community Resilience Benchmark: A CommitmentResilience is the ability of a community to positively adapt to change. This means anticipating the future and acting to mitigate potential harm while preparing to seize the opportunities inherent in turbulence and change. There currently is no practical, easily understandable way for communities to know their strengths, weaknesses or trajectories and therefore no way for them to gauge their resilience. With no understanding of their resilience position, communities have little impetus to undertake the vital but difficult challenge of taking action to reduce risk. They are unable to see that they can achieve clear short-term benefits through better access to capital, lower interest rates, and a more accommodating insurance market by taking actions to make the whole community more resilient in the longer-term. A Community Benchmark will reflect the strengths and weaknesses of the community, its trajectory, and its ability to positively respond to and rapidly recover from disruptive events. Because communities are highly interconnected, a community’s ability to rapidly recover from a natural disaster depends as strongly on its social and economic attributes as on the resilience of its infrastructure. Thus, a Community Benchmark must encompass the Whole Community.Creation of a national community resilience Community Benchmark requires broad engagement of stakeholders with strong equity in America’s communities. By our commitment to this project we support a neutrally-facilitated, stakeholder-driven, collaborative process that creates a practical and useful structure that incentivizes action by America’s communities. Show less