By Meghan Mertyris
With the growing threat of extreme weather and rising seas, disasters will occur with greater frequency and intensity across our country, including in areas that haven’t experienced such conditions before. Families with the lowest incomes and from the most marginalized groups are often most at risk because government policies have located their homes in high-risk areas and failed to invest in the infrastructure needed to prevent harm. As a result, it is essential that we robustly and equitably invest in resilience measures, or the things we do to make our communities stronger and better able to withstand disasters.
Let’s be clear, low-income communities did not choose to place themselves in areas with high risk of disaster. Often, these communities were forced into their current location by federal, state, and local policies designed to enforce segregation and inequality. This doesn’t have to be this way. These are political choices our elected officials have made by changing laws and policies. NLIHC’s Disaster Housing Recovery Coalition (https://tr.ee/MhlCdF) has been working to influence such changes. The DHRC is a coalition of over 900 organizations, working to ensure that federal disaster recovery efforts reach all impacted households, including those with the lowest incomes, and marginalized groups who are often the hardest hit by disasters and have the fewest resources to recover.
A new way forward begins by shifting our understanding of what it means to recover. Disaster recovery doesn’t mean things return to the way they were before the disaster occurred. In other words, we should all be better prepared, have a greater sense of stability, and have access to the resources we need to thrive. For this to happen, the work of resiliency must be done before, during, and after disasters.
What do we mean in practice when we say resilience? The definition varies in different disciplines, and there is no single definition that is universally accepted. The DHRC promotes a proactive rather than reactive definition of resilience. Proactive resilience allows a community to adapt to the “new normal” and thrive. As researchers (https://tr.ee/hRbTPS) Klein, Nichols, and Thomalla put it best, "a society relying on reactive resilience approaches the future by strengthening the status quo and making the present system resistant to change, whereas one that develops proactive resilience accepts the inevitability of change and tries to create a system that is capable of adapting to new conditions and imperatives."
In addition to using a proactive approach to resilience, we must broaden our perception of what makes a community resilient. While many still approach the concept of resilience by focusing on the physical aspects of a community—power plants, water systems, roads, and bridges—the DHRC supports a broader view of resilience that doesn’t value property over people. Resilience shouldn’t just consist of physical mitigation and adaptation techniques, but should also include things like food sovereignty, energy independence, and environmental justice that people depend on every day.
When it comes to resilience, one size doesn’t fit all. What works in one town won’t work in another. What one community finds beneficial, the next will not. The important thing is that the community is robustly and meaningfully engaged from the start of the process to the end of the process and has the capacity to ensure that this participation is substantive. This means that the community has multiple ways to weigh in on what’s happening, they’re communicated with in a way that is accessible and understandable, and, at the end of the day, whatever conclusion they come to is respected. Overall, the better the community engagement, the more resilient we are.
This is a big task, and to achieve it we need everyone, so the DHRC has convened a coalition made up of advocates of all kinds—community organizers, disaster survivors, lawyers, researchers, and more. We invite you to join us (https://tr.ee/F62Gow)! The DHRC runs out of a Working Group that meets every other Wednesday at 2:00 pm ET. This virtual meeting is the best place to get plugged in and get involved!