Navigating the great unraveling: How communities are building place‑based resilience

How do our communities prepare for a disrupted future? The growing frequency and variety of global disruptions and unraveling raise the question of how communities can prepare.

This is the backdrop for our new series of articles that we are gathering here on Resilience.org under the tag #resilientneighbors. The tag captures what we’ve found to be true: everyone has neighbors, and everyone can play a role in making their neighborhood more resilient. Geography doesn’t limit this.

Under different names, growing “community resilience” is a goal of many. But at the same time, community is about more than covering your a** when the s*** hits the fan, to merge two common sentiments. Wherever we live, we break bread and form community. Or we try to. By many measures, individuals in the Global West are feeling increasingly isolated, lonely, and under-resourced. Many living in the richest zip codes in the U.S. and countries in the world lack a feeling of community and feel it as a detriment to security.

What makes a town or neighborhood feel like a community? How do we build connections today that can both make life feel more joyful and connected—and help us feel more secure and resilient? 

Our series starts in Guilford, Vermont, a rural town with a population of 2,100 and roughly 1,100 households, neighbors are experimenting with ways to get to know each other better. Through community-building exercises, they are learning to share skills and build connections that make a place feel like home — discovering that, both by design and as a happy side effect, these efforts also make the town more resilient in emergencies and over time. And they are lessons we will be sharing in this series of articles by us—co-authors Chuck Collins (of Guilford) and Tristan Roberts (of neighboring Halifax). 

This series will explore lessons learned from community-building experiments in our towns, as well as neighboring towns and further afield. We’ll also share stories from Seattle and California and worldwide to find lessons that everyone can use. We offer ways to strengthen civic networks and mutual aid amid mounting ecological and social challenges.

Guilford residents have launched several experiments in building community connections, mutual aid, and community preparedness. Ranging from efforts as simple as a weekly coffee “klatch” to more complex “work bee” exchanges between six families. None of these tools is unique to Guilford, but we found each worth studying and sharing for its ease of replicability.  

We will report on experiments in what we’ll call “place-based resilience,” to offer ideas, inspiration, and practical tips for those interested in replicating and adapting such efforts in their localities. Our series of articles starts in Guilford, then branches out as we report from other communities across the U.S.

We use the term “place-based resilience” to distinguish what’s happening in towns like Guilford from top-down emergency planning or national policy. These are efforts built by neighbors around the specific needs, assets, and relationships of a single community. That means they look different everywhere — Guilford’s initiatives are shaped by its distinct mix of people whose names you’ll read in these stories, and what residents of a small rural town actually want and are willing to spend time doing. An urban neighborhood might have a very different constellation of approaches.

We hope the can-do spirit above all is contagious, and to that end, we encourage you to listen to what your own community needs. After all, the strongest version of place-based resilience isn’t one borrowed from somewhere else. It’s the one that grows from your own soil. We can attest that the stronger ties we feel in our community — a direct result of these initiatives — are something any community can cultivate by listening to each other’s needs and making the effort.

Readers can follow the series by checking out these articles:

• Does your neighborhood need a coffee klatch?
• Our town, our table: The community-building power of a shared meal

Follow all subsequent posts in this series here.