Community Resilience Research

The Community and Regional Resilience Institute is recognized in the area of resilience research as a center of community-based resilience study.  We are shepherding the national portfolio of research and we act as a facilitator to promote linkages among the larger family of resilience centers in the nation.  CARRI has had significant success in fully integrating its research efforts into the community practice as well as assembling an outstanding group of university, national laboratory and independent scholars from across the US.

CARRI publicizes community-based research, academic papers and case studies to provide support to organizations and agencies working in the community resilience field. Additionally, we focus on identifying the gaps in community resilience knowledge to be better able to provide advice on national research requirements. CARRI sponsors workshops and seminars to assemble those working in the area of community resilience and promotes cooperation and collaboration on this nationally vital research area.

The CARRI Research Component: An opportunity both to apply what we know about Resilience and to improve what we know about Resilience

From its beginning, CARRI has been designed to combine community engagement activities with research activities. The reason is not that CARRI is a research project. It is a resilience project. But research is important in several ways.

First of all, it is important for the Initiative to make sure that how it is viewing resilience and how it seeks to assure resilience is based on knowledge and evidence, not just ad hoc ideas. We want to get it right. To help with this, CARRI has commissioned a number of summaries of the current knowledge about resilience by leading experts in this field.

Second, CARRI believes that enhancing resilience within the three communities which are our partners in the Initiative depends not only on top-down knowledge on the part of national experts but also on bottom-up knowledge on the part of experts and stakeholders who know each community. Accordingly, it will be supporting local resilience assessments conducted by local expert teams. Beyond producing knowledge and information for the community engagement process over the next year or so, these research teams will continue to be available as sources of expertise to their communities over the longer run.

Third, CARRI is convinced that what is learned from these three intense local experiences about resilience and how to achieve it will enrich the knowledge bases available to other communities as they set out on similar paths. In this sense, the community engagements contribute knowledge to a wider user community along with advancing resilience within the participating community.

Fourth, CARRI will be working toward a web-based decision support tool to assist interested communities in becoming more resilient. This tool will need the expertise of a wide range of experts in the research community. Again, connecting with the very best available research will help us to get it right.

The fact is that this kind of interactive linkage between research and practice is very rare. The final connection between CARRI and research may be to increase our nation’s understanding of how to connect research with decision support and action, which could be an enormous extra benefit for society at large.

News/Updates

1. Tom Wilbanks Article October 2008