Building Community Capacity and Fostering Disaster Resilience

Abstract

We advocate for using an ecological framework grounded in such values as collaboration, social justice, empowerment, and an appreciation of diversity to guide disaster work with communities. We highlight the need to: (a) focus on building community-specific capacity for disaster preparedness, response, and recovery; (b) emphasize increasing the capacity and supportive potential of community members' natural settings to promote wellness; (c) address power and resource inequities; and (d) enhance capacity to ensure contextually and culturally appropriate structures, methods, and interventions.

Killing Martin county : resiliency in a central Appalachian community.

“…In respect to disaster resiliency, social capital refers to anything that connects people. Even though community attributes, like the economy or politics, connect people, social capital describes networks, relationships, trust, and collective identity (Gilbert 2010;Cagney et al 2015;Gil-Rivas & Kilmer 2016). The stronger social capital is within a community, the stronger the resilient capacity will be.…”

“…The term itself is a construct emerging from contested definitions and frameworks, conceptualizations, understandings, processes, and meanings associated with it (Aldunce et al 2014). For one, there are countless interacting systems impacting disaster resiliency (Gil-Rivas & Kilmer 2016). Each disaster will impact a community uniquely.…”

“…Each disaster will impact a community uniquely. Once disaster hits, countless factors influence the speed, in which impacts are reduced, like the racial and economic composition of the community (Cagney et al 2016;Cutter 2016;Gil-Rivas & Kilmer 2016). Resilient capacity, political capital, social capital, and adaptive resiliency will differ across multiple settings.…”

“…Immediate disasters are sudden events and further categorized as natural or technological. Natural disasters result from the natural environment, whereas technological disasters result from human error or intent (Aiena et al 2016: Gil-Rivas & Kilmer 2016. On the other hand, silent disasters are not sudden but gradually manifest over time.…”

“…Governments help reduce feelings of uncertainty by informing communities about the disaster and by directing recovery. Social capital refers to any anything that connects a community, like networks, relationships, trust, and collective identity (Gilbert 2010;Cagney et al 2016;Gil-Rivas & Kilmer 2016). However, forms of political and social capital reduce in marginalized communities (Henly-Shepard et al 2015).…”