Introduction
Who and what is this toolkit for?
This toolkit was compiled in the aftermath of flooding in 2023 and 2024 for communities, mutual aid groups, local organizations, and municipalities to use in assessing and building resilience to disaster and disruption. We are community members, organizers, and caretakers. We made this toolkit because we needed it when the waters rose. We hope you choose to use this toolkit as a starting place to develop a Resilience Hub that supports your community in the day-to-day and when acute disaster strikes. You may also find this toolkit useful if you’re located somewhere else with a lot of rain, mountains, and people living in floodplains.
What is resilience?
Resilience is the ability of a community to survive, respond, and adapt to disaster with an orientation towards thriving conditions. We recognize that both acute and everyday disasters are conditions that demand increased community resilience.
There are many everyday disasters that shape our world—the rising cost of food, climate disruption, political volatility, and more. Building baseline resilience makes both everyday and acute disasters less destructive.
We know that people who are closest to problems are closest to solutions. As you use this toolkit, prioritize including people who are often excluded from governance and most vulnerable to everyday and acute disaster.
We are framing resilience as a combination of stuff (physical objects), systems (real things you can't touch), and the people who run systems, steward stuff, and create community.
What is a resilience hub?
A resilience hub can look many ways, but at its core, it is a centralized source of information, support, and supplies that supports community resilience. Here are some examples:
- A library or church basement where emergency supplies are housed and community meals get hosted
- A set of buildings in a town that address various community resilience needs (refrigeration, storage, backup power, water supply)
- A Signal group with representatives from local working groups responsible for different components of community resilience
- A dedicated building like a community center that meets emergency and baseline resilience needs
How do I use this toolkit?
There are three sections in the toolkit. Knowing your community is about getting ready to use the toolkit with people in the place where you live. Emergency Preparedness and Response is about the stuff and systems that are essential for acute disaster response. The Baseline Resilience section is about the stuff and systems we need to create safer, thriving conditions for all people outside of and before acute disaster.
Instead of serving as a prescriptive list of ways to build resilience, think of this toolkit as a set of prompts, or a work plan, for strengthening community-based resilience. In order to work on the projects laid out in this toolkit, you will need a group of people who are excited to work together and solve problems. That group can include people who are already solving problems and planning for disasters, people who are new to your town, and anyone in between.
You should use this toolkit in any way that is useful to you. If your community is already doing resilience work, pull out sections that are relevant, and ignore ones that are not. If your community is getting started on resilience work, use the checklist in this toolkit and hold a gathering to assess vulnerabilities and assets, then identify where you want to start working to increase community resilience. This process will help clarify what form you want your resilience hub to take.
If you want a thought partner or to hire a consultant to support your community in this process, contact Community Resilience Organizations (CROs) - info@gocros.org.
How does this toolkit interact with emergency management and municipal plans?
Many towns and villages are already working on flood mitigation strategies, and have staff or volunteers dedicated to this work. Too often, this work is under-resourced or is unable to reach the people most vulnerable to impacts of acute and everyday disaster. From COVID lockdown to flooding events in the last few years, Vermonters have learned that community-based preparedness and response efforts fill an essential gap.
This toolkit aims to help community groups identify where work needs to be done and provides a holistic framework for thinking about community resilience. It can be challenging to get taken seriously as providers of mutual aid without job titles or official positions. As grassroots organizers who often don't get paid but show up anyway, we know that our work is legitimate and valuable. We hope this toolkit can help you feel and show up that way as well.
Competition is not necessary between municipal and community plans. If your selectboard is excited about community-based resilience planning, involve them in the use of this toolkit! There is no single plan, tool, or process that will prepare us for collapse and disruption—rather, it will be a combination of working together, learning from each other, and using this toolkit and other resources that gets your community to resilience.
Phases of Disaster
There are different sections of this toolkit that correspond to the different phases of recovery. The Baseline sections of this toolkit are intended for use in the Preparedness phase. The Emergency sections of this toolkit are relevant for Preparedness, Short-term Recovery, and Intermediate Recovery phase after acute disaster. For support with Long-term Recovery see the map of Long Term Recovery Groups, which cover most of our state. See next section for a graphic detailing the phases.
What's beyond resilience?
Our hope as grassroots organizers and community leaders is that you will use this toolkit to build resilience, and then keep going. We believe that climate disruption, while devastating and dangerous, is also an opportunity to create new ways of being together and getting our needs met so that we don't just survive, but thrive. We hope that communities can become