Truman School of Government and Public Affairs

The Institute of Public Policy (IPP), with funding from a National Science Foundation EPSCoR grant, has spent the first two years of the project researching what makes communities resilient in the face of natural and human-made threats.  The goal of this research was to provide communities with the capacity and tools to prepare resilience plans for a broad range of natural and human-made threats. From this research, indexes have been developed to measure regional vulnerability and resilience mapped out by county across the United States.  IPP along with the Center for Applied Research and Environmental Systems (CARES) has introduced a website equipped with an online mapping and reporting tool that conveniently displays and breaks down the data used to formulate the resiliency indexes. This, in conjunction with a community capacity building guidebook, also developed by IPP, is designed to aid community and regional planers in helping them build more resilient communities. The interactive resiliency tools as well as the research papers used to formulate them can be found on the project’s website at www.BuildingRegionalResilience.org.

IPP is working with MU Extension in piloting a community resilience planning session in spring 2018 with local planners in Northwest Missouri. Working alongside publication partners on the Missouri EPSCoR project, a case study publication will be produced based on the practical application of using the resiliency research and planning methodologies developed on the website. Thus further expanding the understanding of resilience capacity building.