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

How can communities prepare for a disrupted future? The growing frequency and variety of global disruptions, sometimes referred to as the great unraveling, raise the urgent question of how to create resilient communities.

This is the backdrop for our new series here on Resilience, Resilient Neighbors. The title Resilient Neighbors captures what we’ve found to be true: everyone has neighbors, and everyone can play a role in making their neighborhood more resilient, no matter where you are in the world.

Under various names, strengthening community resilience is a widely shared goal. But 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 at least try to. Yet by many measures, people across the Global North feel increasingly isolated, lonely, and under-resourced. Even in the wealthiest U.S. zip codes and countries around the world, many people lack a sense of community and see this absence of cohesion as a threat to security.

We explore a range of questions about community connection and resilience, including: What makes a town or neighborhood feel like a community? How do we build connections today that can make life feel more joyful and connected—and help us feel more secure and resilient? 

This series starts in Guilford, Vermont, a rural town with a population of 2,100 and roughly 1,100 households. Here, neighbors are experimenting with ways to get to know each other better. Guilford residents have launched several experiments in building community connections, mutual aid, and community preparedness. These range from efforts as simple as a weekly coffee meet or “klatch” to more complex “work bee” exchanges between families. 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. These are lessons we will be sharing in this series authored by us: Chuck Collins (of Guilford) and Tristan Roberts (of neighboring Halifax). 

None of these tools are unique to Guilford, but we found each worth studying, sharing, and easy to replicate.

We’ll also share stories from Seattle, California, and around the world to find lessons anyone can use. We offer ways to strengthen civic networks and mutual aid amid mounting ecological and social challenges.

We will report on experiments in what we call “place-based resilience” to offer ideas, inspiration, and practical tips for those interested in adapting such efforts in their localities. We use the term place-based resilience to distinguish what’s happening in towns like Guilford from top-down emergency planning or national policy. Crucially, these efforts are developed by neighbors around their specific needs, assets, and relationships. 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 of the communities featured 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.

More stories from the series:

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

Explore more stories from the Resilient Neighbors series here.

Tristan Roberts writes from Quill Nook Farm in Halifax, Vermont, where he grows and teaches about heritage plants. He was elected to the Vermont House and served from 2023 to 2025, and is also the founder of Metricorps, a community for sustainability practitioners.