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Overview of a Framework for Building Community Resilience: CART
Resilience is a continuous process that can be built upon and improved over time. It is a state of being that can help improve individual and communities’ responses to disaster.
Festivals as a vehicle for building community resilience can also assist in transitioning communities from one of dispersed people and places by bringing them back together for short periods.
Festival organizers can gain a lot from understanding how resilience can play a role in assisting with recovery and even how festivals and festival organizations can be part of this recovery process. There are existing frameworks available for communities to assess and build up their resilience in the broadest sense of the word.
The Communities Advancing Resilience Tool Kit (CART): An Intervention to Build Community Resilience to Disaster
CART is a community intervention designed to enhance community resilience by bringing stakeholders together to address community issues in a process that includes assessment, feedback, planning and action. The tools include a community resilience survey and other assessment and analytical tools. Public engagement is encouraged for problem-solving and the development and use of local assets to address community needs. 4 domains contribute to community resilience: connection and caring, resources, transformative potential, and disaster management.
It is important to distinguish that community resilience is not strictly the totality of the resiliency of individual community members but rather a collective group's ability to take “deliberate, purposeful, and collection action to alleviate the detrimental effects of adverse events” (p251). Community resilience is a building experience through the development of attitudes, thoughts, beliefs, behaviours, and resources.
The 4 domains of Community Resilience are (Pfefferbaum et al., 2013, p. 252):
Connection and Caring
A sense of belonging and a commitment to community can help strengthen participation, ownership, and personal investment. Supporting and nurturing communities address the needs of diverse members and can instill hope during crisis.
Resources
Whether resources are tangible or intangible, resilient communities have diverse and redundant resources to permit them to serve their communities even with disruptions. A community’s structure with roles and responsibilities can create the capacity for preparedness and decisive, timely responses in urgent times.
Transformative Potential
This domain includes a community’s ability to identify the successes and failures of their situation, assess their performance, and engage in critical analysis. Leaders in the community can then establish change with new goals, decision-making, and strategy implementation. This can be done at the individual, family, organizational or systematic level.
Disaster Management
Lastly, this domain includes disaster prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. It engages risk assessment, and mitigation to decrease the chances of or exposure to the crisis event. Preparedness is a constant activity of identifying vulnerabilities and addressing them with the necessary resources. Disaster response is the short-term actions required to support basic human needs, followed by recovery which rebuilding of homes, lives and communities occurs.
The CART Tool Kit is designed to stimulate communication, analysis, and action. Communities with higher levels of competence in the 4 domains may be more effective at responding to disaster when needed. Organizations using CART must have access to and be able to motivate community stakeholders implement activity and effort for change.
The CART Toolkit includes the following assessment tools:
CART assessment survey questionnaire
CART assessment survey questionnaire for assessing a community resilience. The design of the survey also allows for concerns of sponsoring organizations to be added. The survey allows for a baseline of community information that can be used to help identify the strengths and challenges that are important for the community and sponsoring organizations. This survey is administered early in the process, can be conducted after a disaster or intervention, and then compared with baseline data.
Key informant interviews
Key informant interviews are help which provide qualitative information from individuals who are knowledgeable about the community and the issues. Guidelines for who to include in your interviews and how to conduct them are included. The findings can be used to provide more context to the survey, develop goals and objectives, start new programs, or evaluate existing ones. The questions include the 4 CART domains, terrorism preparedness and public engagement. Questions can be adjusted as needed.
Data collection
Data collection framework provides a checklist for identifying the type and sources of available data that can be used by a community in strategic planning to build community resilience (255). The data that is gathered may assist in giving more context about a community, identify local resources, or highlight challenges. This collection process can occur at any time but it should be updated when there are significant changes or factors that would influence community life outside of the norm.
Community Conversations
Exchanging information and ideas among members in the community that may be subject matter enthusiasts or experts can help foster data collection.
Neighbourhood infrastructure maps
Neighbourhood infrastructure maps are required to focus on relevant structures and features important for disaster management. This can highlight physical buildings, but also improve networking with neighbours, and help when orientating new members to an organization or community.
Community Ecological Maps
Community Ecological Maps are a visual took for describing the nature and strength of relationships within a community. They can provide insight into communication flows, the ability to create partnerships or coalitions, improve relationships and relieve tension (256).
Stakeholder Analysis
This process involves identifying and describing who can influence the organization or event, consider the influence whether positive or negative, and create strategics to gain effective support or curtail opposition to, the organization or event. This process can: assist in framing or shaping a program, anticipate reactions, uncover conflict, identify consequences, recognize advocates, and gain or maintain support.
SWOT Analysis
SWOT – analysis is commonly referred to as a process to investigate internal strengths and weaknesses, and external opportunities and threats. They can be conducted before, during or after an initiative or event.
Capacity and vulnerability assessment
Capacity and vulnerability assessment tool is a framework for analysing the long-term strengths and weaknesses of individuals and groups in a community to review their physical and material limitations and resources, social and organizational deficiencies and assets, and motivations and attitudes.
The implementation of any strategic plans that are the result of a CART process need to be established with a schedule in mind and determine the measures of success ahead of time of implementation. Ideally communities participate in all four stages but if they don’t, valuable information will still be forthcoming that can contribute to a community’s resiliency.
Ultimately, the CART process focuses, through, participatory action, on creating, maintaining, and enhancing resilience from within a community.
Pfefferbaum, R. L., Pfefferbaum, B., Van Horn, R. L., Klomp, R. W., Norris, F. H., & Reissman, D. B. (2013). The communities advancing resilience toolkit (CART): An intervention to build community resilience to disasters. Journal of public health management and practice, 19(3), 250-258.
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