Summit Mission Statement:

To come together as partners to start a movement that builds long-lasting community resilience throughout the Inland Empire by addressing underlying obstacles.

Overview:

Building Resilient Communities is hosting our first-ever Community Resiliency Summit Reconvening bringing together the leaders, changemakers, and pioneers with a strategic focus to build community resilience. Community resilience is the capacity of individuals, families, and organizations to prepare for--and to recover from--the physical, health, social, and economic impacts of a disaster so they are less vulnerable to disasters and able to recover sooner. FEMA ranks California as having the second-highest number of natural disasters in the US since 1953. We cannot control when disasters happen, but we can control our communities' ability to withstand disasters.

We’ll explore how common social vulnerability characteristics, such as race and ethnicity, education, gender, household composition, income and poverty, housing tenure, and age, all lead to differences in community capacity, information, power, and control, and resources, and which ultimately results in disparities in response to, and recovery from, disasters.

“Resilience is the capacity of any entity—an individual, a community, an organization, or a natural system—to prepare for disruption, to recover from shocks and stresses, and to adapt and grow from a disruptive experience. As you build resilience, therefore, you become more able to prevent or mitigate stresses and shocks you can identify and better able to respond to those you can’t predict or avoid. You also develop a greater capacity to bounce back from a crisis, learn from it, and achieve revitalization.” “In the twenty-first century, building resilience is one of our most urgent social and economic issues because we live in a world that is defined by disruptions.”

Judith Rodin, Being Strong in a World Where Things Go Wrong: the Resilience Dividend