Directors' welcome

Branching out to solve problems further upstream

This year, the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience has been “impatient for action but patient for outcomes.” These are the words of Maureen Bisognano, quoted in Dan Heath’s bestselling book Upstream [see page 11], and they are very appropriate to describe the current phase of our efforts to scale up our impact. In 2022, we expanded our capacity to bolster community resilience in transformative and significant ways. While we have not yet realized some of the important systems changes that our community needs, this work has taken root in several key ways that we are happy to share with you in this annual report.

Engaging resilience leadership

We have deepened our engagement with the Council of Resilience Leaders, influential individuals from across Maricopa County who represent private, nonprofit and public sectors. As an external advisory group, the council supports KER in building Maricopa County’s capacity to adapt to shocks and stresses in ways that provide added benefits for its residents. They are helping us in three main ways.

Awareness: We asked the council to help us expand our knowledge on what is going on in the community and vice versa, share with their networks the work that KER is doing.

Action: Real change happens when someone acts on the knowledge we share. Small actions can turn into bigger — and more disruptive — actions.

Award: We also asked the council to identify an organization in Arizona who will be recognized with the Resilience Prize. See page 15 to read about this year’s winner!

Working to face systems problems upstream

We have also increased our focus on concepts with “upstream” opportunities for systems change [see page 11]. The idea behind upstream thinking is to take a proactive stance ahead of the challenges we face, to avoid the downstream results that create the need for resilience action in the first place. While we still need to understand how to withstand shocks and stresses, we are also concerned about reducing the probability or magnitude of these shocks we know we will face. The upstream analogy is perfect when thinking about how to scale up impact because it means we look broadly for solutions and, in some cases, aim to solve problems before they even happen.

Growing our partnerships and resources

KER and ASU can’t do this alone. We need to continue to amplify our influence with stakeholders, including generating the intellectual and fiscal resources to support the work we do together. To do so, we are growing our partnerships and our funding in several key ways.

Policy solutions: We are developing our capacity to engage with policy solutions. Read about this year’s Hunch Lunch on page 15.

Federal impact: We have expanded our reach with national level federal agencies. Read about our blossoming work with federal agencies on page 25.

Funding our work: Our team has leveraged the Piper Trust investment with even greater ROI. Dig into the numbers on page 37.

Private sector: We have deepened our engagement with private sector partnerships. Learn about our collaboration with Swiss Re and 3M on page 33.

The challenges we impatiently face

As our work continues, one of the challenges we have faced is that the concept of community resilience remains a difficult idea for individuals and organizations. The concept is complex because it could be interpreted as protecting communities from experiencing disasters and shocks, an effort to be “fail safe.” But it is near impossible to accurately predict what will happen in the future — even with systems that we truly understand. Can anyone honestly tell us when we might have the next global pandemic? Or how the housing and energy markets will affect us? Instead, building community resilience means acknowledging that there will be conditions and events that we cannot predict. But with better social networks, exchange of data and shared solutions, communities are better prepared to respond to all of these unknown shocks. We become “safe to fail”. As we patiently await what uncertainties the future holds, we will impatiently work to put into place the knowledge exchange needed for greater resilience.

Elizabeth Wentz, Director and Principal Investigator, wentz@asu.edu

Patricia Solís, Executive Director, patricia.solis@asu.edu