Moving the Needle Towards Resilient Communities: A Field Guide for Equitable, Community-Led Resilience Planning (Routledge Research in Environmental Policy and Politics)

This field guide offers practical guidance for readers to initiate and engage in resilience planning with their communities in a structured, deliberative way that emphasizes equity.

The contents revolve around lessons learned from The Resilience Adaptation Feasibility Tool (RAFT) on-the-ground community initiative to advance resilience across communities in Virginia. Chapters provide background about resilience planning; a starting point for conducting holistic assessment of a community’s resilience with a focus on equity; recommendations for establishing an infrastructure for long- term commitment to resilience; and suggestions for identifying and planning activities and projects to build momentum for achieving resilience outcomes.

The format offers an easy read for non-technical audiences such as community planners, community leaders, or nonprofit agency staff to quickly and efficiently get the guidance they need for community-based, equity-focused resilience planning.

Juita-Elena (Wie) Yusuf is Professor of Public Service at Old Dominion University. Her areas of expertise are in public finance, infrastructure planning, coastal community resilience, climate change and sea-level rise, public participation, and stakeholder engagement. She develops resilience products for use by general, non-technical audiences including planners, businesses, and residents.

Tanya Denckla Cobb is Director of the Institute for Engagement & Negotiation at the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, University of Virginia. She is a seasoned environmental and public policy mediator, working with people across all sectors to address challenging, complex issues through equitable collaboration and seeking sustainable solutions.

Sierra Gladfelter is Senior Associate at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Engagement & Negotiation, where she leads community engaged climate resilience, facilitation, and collaborative planning projects. Sierra has over a decade of climate adaptation experience and has been the project manager of The RAFT for the last seven years.

Elizabeth Andrews is Distinguished Law & Policy Fellow at the Institute for Engagement & Negotiation, University of Virginia. Her expertise in climate resiliency law and policy derives from many years of teaching and practice with the Virginia Coastal Policy Center at William & Mary Law School and the Virginia Attorney General’s office.