Director’s Welcome A year of discovering opportunities for resilience dividends When the recession hit in 2008, it manifested itself in a housing collapse in the Valley that tested the resilience of nearly every community. “Upside down” in their mortgages, neighbors left overnight. Houses were abandoned. Communities faced holes in them that took years to fill. The collapse tore at the social fabric of nearly every Maricopa County community. All communities experience stresses. They can be sudden shocks (like floods and earthquakes) or they can be long-term, constant stresses. In each instance, how well the community survives the stress or shock — through proactive planning, nimble actions and openness to evolution — and how quickly it can bounce back is a measure of its resilience. Now, thanks to the vision and generosity of the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust, we have fully launched the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience at Arizona State University, and completed our first year of action. We have been working to build community resilience by partnering with and studying the community up close, finding the gaps and vulnerabilities that exist in our community infrastructure to respond to various kinds of shocks and stresses. By embedding in the communities of Maricopa County and tapping the expertise of research scientists, citizen scientists, community members and partner organizations, KER is designed to become a community resource destined to collectively address pressing issues and needs, fostering positive change and building resilience — in innovative ways. There really has never been anything like this for social systems. We are geared toward learning about people and their lives and turning that information into something that can be used by municipalities, private companies, NGOs and other agencies to improve the lives of the people who are living here. To do this, our team brings together representatives from all sectors to identify and focus on the vulnerabilities of the community. A unique power of the KER model resides within the “knowledge exchange.” As you will read in this annual report, our efforts have centered on the opportunity for community organizations to be partners in every stage of the research — from identifying issues to data collection, decision making and implementation. The combination of information, knowledge, diverse viewpoints and open discussion is expected to enhance the collective ability to
make informed decisions and plan for the community’s future. A central concept that has come to guide us to put in place the knowledge infrastructure and exchange mechanisms necessary to accomplish this lofty goal is the concept of Resilience Dividends. In our first Celebration for Resilience, we were able to engage with a leading figure promoting that concept, Dr. Judith Rodin. She defines them as follows: “Resilience Dividends: Building resilience creates two aspects of benefits: it enables individuals, communities, and organizations to better withstand a disruption more effectively, and it enables them to improve their current systems and situations. But it also enables them to build new relationships, take on new endeavors and initiatives, and reach out for new opportunities, ones that may never have been imagined before. This is the resilience dividend.” — Dr. Judith Rodin, Author, The Resilience Dividend: Being Strong in a World Where Things Go Wrong
The end result of these partnerships and data activities will be to build capacity across Maricopa County and within ASU to be one of the leading hubs for data-driven resilience action. In the pages of this annual report, we encourage you to learn about this inaugural year’s efforts to build and launch this vision. While we recognize that this process will be a long term endeavor, fraught with challenges, what we have learned so far from our first full year of community engagement and setting the stage gives us a profound sense of hope. We are grateful to all of our staff and partners, within ASU and across the public, private and nonprofit sectors, for helping us to launch these efforts to share, discover and solve.
Elizabeth Wentz Director and Principal Investigator wentz@asu.edu
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