Center Seeks to Help Communities Rebuild

Director of the new Center for Resilient and Sustainable Communities Kathryn Laskey says the transdisciplinary team aims to help global communities rebuild on their own. Photo by Jim Kirby When disaster, natural or man-made, hits a community, volunteers and community members often rush to rebuild what was lost. They search for family mementos in the rubble and try to regain a sense of peace and security. Systems engineering and operations research professor Kathryn Laskey is director of the new transdisciplinary Center for Resilient and Sustainable Communities (C-RASC), which aims to help communities with this rebuilding process and with the preparations that can reduce the impact of disasters. “Pressures from migration and climate change are accelerating, and it creates really difficult social situations that are going to cause difficult social challenges and political unrest,” says Laskey. In collaboration with faculty from the Schar School of Policy and Government, College of Science, School of Business, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, and the College of Health and Human Services, the new center aims to research the best practices to target and support locally led community groups that can help build resiliency in the community before, during, and after a crisis. Laskey says their focus on locally led groups helps ensure that the solutions they are building will work for the people in that location. “It doesn’t work to go into these communities in a paternalistic sort of way and tell people how to run their society.” And with a transdisciplinary approach, Laskey and the rest of the faculty involved hope that they can really make a difference in communities in Virginia, the United States, and the world. “We want to do common good for the commonwealth,” says Tonya Neaves, director for the Centers on the Public Service in the Schar School and one of the faculty on the C-RASC Leadership Council. “Emergency management takes more than one viewpoint.” The C-RASC model follows a feedback loop of developing local solutions, producing the local capacity to build and maintain a resilient community, and then learning from those solutions, adjusting if needed, and carrying the lessons learned from one community to the next. “The idea is to support resilience so that when something happens you can withstand the disruption, and not just bounce back, but bounce forward better,” says Laskey. Since the center began in fall 2019, they have started on numerous local and global projects. One project collaborates with Arba Minch University in Ethiopia and the company Global MapAid to outline maps for a sustainable irrigation system for farms throughout the country. “If the rain falls at the wrong time of the year, which it has been doing, then farmers go hungry,” says Laskey. “This system really helps with food security.” The center has also hired a new assistant director, Hannah Torres, and continues to reach out across the university for new partners across disciplines. “We continue to reach out and look for opportunities to do transdisciplinary research with a resilience focus,” says Laskey. “Mason’s vision is research of consequence, and if this center is successful, then this will make a difference in people’s lives,” says Laskey.

—Ryley McGinnis

THE IDEA IS TO SUPPORT RESILIENCE SO THAT WHEN SOMETHING HAPPENS YOU CAN WITHSTAND THE DISRUPTION, AND NOT JUST BOUNCE BACK, BUT BOUNCE FORWARD BETTER.

—Kathryn Laskey, director of the Center for Resilient and Sustainable Communities