What Kind of Future Are We Building?
Resilience is the capacity of an entire city to adapt and thrive in times of acute shocks and chronic stresses.
Resilient cities engage the entire community to meet fundamental human health needs and ensure solutions that promote economic, social/racial equity, and environmental well-being.
Resilient communities organize at the grassroots level, think systemically and act innovatively to co-create wide-scale systems change, and a fundamental culture shift in how we think about our cities and world, creating regenerative futures.
Our Approach
goals
Acting together to achieve these goals.
Goal 1: Innovating Solutions – Supporting cities and communities in addressing their self-identified needs, challenges, and opportunities for resilience leading to innovations that other cities can adopt.
Goal 2: Collaborating for Impact – Convening peer learning teams who are co-creating best practices, leveraging resources, expanding capacities, and implementing solutions to scale our collective impact.
Goal 3: Engaging Community Stakeholders – Supporting sustainability and racial equity champions by establishing commissions that effectively partner with city staff, elected leaders, residents, businesses, schools, and institutions to take action for community-wide resilience.
Goal 4: Shaping Public Policy – Advocating with cities and communities for public policies needed to accelerate equitable practices and investments to achieve local, regional, and state climate goals.
Goal 5: Modeling Resilience – Modeling resilience to catalyze change regionally, nationally, and globally.
STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT
Our Approach to Stakeholder Engagement – RCC stakeholders and staff work with local leaders to complete five engagement steps.
Bridging Relationships. (Step 1) organizing a citizen sustainability coalition (2) building a broader base of support within their community among students, faith communities, BIPOC communities, League of Women Voters, businesses, and environmentalists.
Building Capacity. (3) finding a City Council Member and city staff who are working on sustainability (4) passing a City Council Resolution to form a Sustainability commission to guide the resilience work fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Acting Together. (5) Recruiting diverse, motivated volunteers to serve on their Sustainability Commission that creates and implements an annual sustainability/resilience work plan in partnership with their City Council and their City Staff Green Team.
“Sometimes in order to keep moving forward, not only must you take one step at a time, but you must be willing to look back occasionally and evaluate your past, no matter how painful it is. Looking back lets you know whether or not you are headed in the right direction.” G.K. Adams
sustainability, resilience, & regeneration
RCC was born out of the sustainability movement; is part of the resilience movement; and looks toward innovating regenerative futures.
Sustainability, resilience, and regeneration build on the foundation of systems thinking yet are distinct concepts designed to guide community development in ways that produce related and unique outcomes. To achieve sustainability, resilience, or regenerative development, we have to integrate earth system models with human system models. Regenerative science refers to this as CHANS – coupling human and natural systems.
RCC is committed to exploring systems and regenerative science as we implement and innovate equitable climate development that can work for people and the planet.