3
Evidence, Insights, and Lessons Learned from Relevant Efforts

This chapter addresses the first task of the study charge: “Examine past and current community engagement efforts, particularly those that have included communities in the Gulf region and Alaska, for the purpose of identifying guiding principles and lessons learned” (see Box 1-2). This chapter addresses this task by (1) describing the methodology that the committee used to examine relevant efforts; (2) identifying cross-cutting and relevant guiding principles and lessons learned from those efforts; and (3) detailing specific programs and describing how they relate to potential EnCoRe partnerships. The best practices and guiding principles identified in this chapter, such as those in Box 3-1, are indicative of what the committee learned from these programs and are not the committee’s own. In Chapter 4, however, the committee shares its core recommendations for the EnCoRe initiative, which are informed by the programs described below.

METHODOLOGY OF EXAMINING RELEVANT EFFORTS

During six virtual, public data-gathering sessions, the committee met with representatives and practitioners from institutions and organizations that were funding and/or conducting community-engaged resilience and public health work and supporting community capacity building. These sessions also included panels of community members that participated in these partnerships and projects. During these sessions, panelists representing both perspectives (institution or organization and community perspectives) were given similar discussion prompts and questions. Committee members moderated the panel and an open discussion followed (see Appendix B for the session agendas; see Appendix C for a complete list of the programs reviewed and considered for virtual engagement). Additionally, closed sessions were convened for the committee to examine other efforts and for committee members to share their own experiences in leading participatory action research and practice (PARP) and community resilience work in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico region and Alaska.

In selecting which efforts to address, the committee considered the following components:

• Jurisdictional scale (e.g., county or parish, region, state, national, international)
• Type of program (e.g., philanthropic, government, academic)
• Goal (e.g., resilience, public health, capacity building, environmental justice)
• Type of partnership (e.g., multisectoral, research-based, academic, community-based)

Although the Enhancing Community Resilience (EnCoRe) initiative intends to undertake direct and long-term community engagement with communities in the Gulf region and Alaska, the committee felt that it was critical to examine a diversity of resilience-building and public health efforts during the course of the study, in terms of these four components.

In addition to ensuring that it heard from diverse programs and efforts, the committee had to do its information gathering with limited time and resources. The choices of programs and communities explored reflect the committee’s priorities. Arranging the virtual data gathering sessions also depended on the availability of community and organizational representatives. Therefore, it was not possible to examine all relevant efforts during the course of the study.

Also, this effort to examine relevant programs and extract lessons learned is not intended to serve as an evaluation of the programs or communities examined. The committee believes that the long-term impacts of most, but not all, of these programs have yet to be determined because many of the programs are ongoing and/or have not yet been evaluated longitudinally. Thus, the identified “lessons learned” are limited in this regard.

In order to identify “guiding principles and lessons learned from past and ongoing efforts” in a way that could inform guidance for the EnCoRe initiative, the conversations during the virtual sessions focused on the following themes and questions (see Appendix B for the session agendas and Appendix C for the list of participants):

• Equity: How do you form and maintain productive and equitable partnerships?
• Partnership initiation criteria and guiding principles:
  • For funding organizations: What criteria and/or guiding principles were used to select communities for your partnerships?
  • For communities: What was your experience with the partnership initiation process, such as the application process or request for support from external organizations, and/or funder requirements to provide project evaluations or metrics during or after project implementation? From your perspective, how could these processes be improved?
• Sustainability and community buy-in: How do you ensure the sustainability of the initial effort and the sustained engagement of community members during and after the initial project funding period?
• Metrics and evaluation: What are the metrics for evaluating the success of resilience, public health, and/or capacity-building partnerships?

• Challenges and barriers and the potential of EnCoRe: What are the challenges and barriers to forming equitable and sustainable partnerships? How can a program like EnCoRe best intervene or align with and enhance existing efforts?

The following sections explore each of these themes in diverse formats to illuminate their interrelations and relevance to various contexts and types of partnerships. For example, many session participants expressed how equitable processes of decision making (i.e., procedural equity) lead to community buy-in and long-term sustainability of the initial effort. Likewise, the potential sustainability of a partnership is itself a criterion that many programs look for when selecting partners. A persistent best practice across resilience-building efforts was the identification of a “community champion” (see Box-3-2). The data gathered during these sessions informed the committee’s core recommendations in Chapter 4.

SUMMARY OF LESSONS LEARNED AND GUIDING PRINCIPLES FROM PREVIOUS AND ONGOING EFFORTS

Equitable Partnerships

As discussed in Chapter 2, a core principle of PARP is the equitable involvement of the people most affected by the problem or issue of concern, and the equitable distribution of resources that the partnership or project provides, including access to decision making (Van Zandt et al., 2020). During a panel discussion about the Consortium for Resilient Gulf Communities (CRGC) initiative, the committee learned about the multiple dimensions that form the content of equity. Distributive equity, which addresses the distribution of risks, benefits, costs, and resources within a community or among different groups and communities, is principal but is often the only aspect of equity that is considered.⁴ Equally critical to distributive equity, procedural equity refers to equitable decision-making processes, including the equitable integration and inclusion of members of different groups in decision-making. Distributive and procedural equity are linked by a third form, contextual equity, which takes into account the historical forces that may have created an unequal playing field for participants in different programs or initiatives and the preexisting conditions that limit or facilitate people’s access to decision-making procedures and resources and, therefore, to the benefits of projects and partnerships (see McDermott et al., 2013).

Across the efforts examined that have sought to strengthen community resilience, several approaches have been employed to ensure equitable partnerships. Approaches to achieving distributional equity have included distributing budgets between community members and scientists or researchers involved in the project, crediting the cocreation of products to the community members involved, and recognizing and contributing to the mutual nonfinancial benefits and rewards of the partnership. Procedural equity has been achieved by establishing

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⁴ See comments by Melissa Finucane, CRGC, in the panel presentation to the committee on January 28, 2022.

meaningful engagement strategies and decision-making processes. Equity goals for projects can be established in collaboration with community partners. Additionally, in some cases the collaborative development of an action-logic model has helped to identify the resources available for a project and map how the outputs and products of the partnership will advance the equity goals that were established in collaboration with community partners. Ensuring distributive and procedural equity allows partnerships to address systemic factors of contextual inequity, such as structural racism. Expanding and improving partnerships in equitable ways is a sustained social process that can take multiple years (3–5 years or more), which the EnCoRe program is well positioned to support. A flexible governance structure can facilitate sustained, effective partnerships by allowing new needs that may not have been identified as part of the original intent or proposal to be addressed and incorporated as the partnership develops.

During a panel discussion with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Environmental Justice Division, EPA staff explained how they center equity into their partnerships in three key ways: (1) through representation, which entails community involvement in the partnership-initiation process and access to decision making; (2) through ensuring the processes for engagement and decision-making remain fair, transparent, and accessible; and (3) through the equitable distribution of the benefits and impacts of the partnership. Additionally, equity is achieved by extending beyond outreach and engagement and including capacity-building efforts in traditionally underserved and overburdened communities through grants, cooperative agreements, and technical assistance. An important lesson learned from EPA efforts is that equity also matters when considering the unintended impacts of projects, such as how community revitalization efforts could result in relocation and community gentrification. Considering and evaluating the potential unintended impacts of a project or partnership is a best practice for ensuring that a project has equitable outcomes.

The need for effective communication emerged from examining resilience efforts as another central theme. Every program stressed how clear communication facilitates equity. For example, using a common and shared language and having open dialogue allow people to contribute and feel confident and safe in relaying how their needs and challenges can be addressed by the partnership. In order to develop cross-cultural understanding, dialogues, community meetings, and focus groups, are generally convened in established venues familiar to community members. Likewise, inviting community members to a research station or other scientific arena is a pathway to build stronger relationships and allow community members to become familiar with the research culture of the partnership.

During data-gathering sessions with communities and institutions in Alaska, the committee heard how academic terminology and the language of community development (e.g., resilience) may not translate into Indigenous language categories. However, Indigenous communities are eager to learn new terminology, and use of Western categories is generally not considered to be problematic. At the same time, Melinda Chase, a tribal liaison at the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center, described how equity is about trying to understand the world from the perspective and the value system of the participating community. Community members

stressed the importance of standardizing terminology over the long term. A shared understanding creates the type of cross-cultural communication necessary to develop and sustain relationships and foster contextual equity by avoiding top-down imposition of processes in favor of a more horizontal codevelopment of the potential partnership. Enabling academic and research content to be accessible, for example, during the application process and during community meetings and the project itself, is a way to ensure procedural equity while working towards language justice. Similarly, it is important to make applications and other materials available in local languages, including Indigenous languages, particularly for Alaska, and in languages such as Spanish, Vietnamese, and Cambodian for the Gulf region.

Community members in the Gulf region and Alaska also emphasized the importance of communication and cross-cultural understanding. They described how both funding organizations and research professionals involved in a community partnership operate on different time scales than most communities. Technical capacity, transportation challenges, and the ongoing impacts of disasters contribute to these differences. It is important for funders and researchers to understand local conditions and local ways of communication during the partnership development process.

In summary, developing equitable partnerships involves the meaningful and active participation of the people impacted by the potential solutions of the proposed research projects, and reflects the needs and priorities of the impacted communities from the start. Project benefits, including funding, should be distributed equitably, especially if the project entails a research component. Procedural equity can be achieved by the development of accessible communication and decision-making pathways between funders, researchers, and communities.

Partnership Initiation Criteria

Through the data-gathering sessions, the committee learned of several guiding principles and criteria for the partnership initiation and selection process, which are listed in Box 3-1.

Sustainability and Community Buy-in

The long-term sustainability of resilience-building efforts and sustained community buy-in during and after partnership initiation were key concerns for the stakeholders that the committee engaged. A cross-cutting guiding principle for ensuring sustainability is to focus on building partnerships and networks among public, private, nongovernmental organizations, and academic sectors within and across communities and jurisdictions (e.g., county or parish, state, federal). This cross-sectoral and cross-jurisdictional strategy was pioneered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Project Impact, a national initiative (1997–2001) that sought to prepare communities for disasters through a whole-community approach. Project Impact fostered community partnerships across sectors and jurisdictions, identified hazards and community-scale vulnerability, prioritized hazard-risk reduction actions, and communicated the success of Project Impact projects and the processes through which this success was enabled (FEMA, 1997). Maria Vorel, the national director of Project Impact, expressed the importance of strong peer mentoring during multisector collaboration, such as linking communities and their issues with relevant problem solvers in a broad and cross-sectoral network. Providing communities access to each other through networking opportunities fostered buy-in at a national level and increased the visibility and awareness of the efforts. The Project Impact strategy tapped into and utilized the strength of community culture, such as creating relevant summer hazard-mitigation jobs for college students and creating opportunities for private mentoring. Ann Patton, a local lead for a Project Impact initiative in Tulsa, Oklahoma, noted how the creation of a nonprofit arm (i.e., a formal 501(c)(3) organization) that could receive donations and be protected from political changes at the federal and local levels was effective in ensuring the longevity of resilience-building efforts.

PROGRAM DETAILS

This section describes several of the programs the committee examined, along with important lessons learned about criteria and approaches that contribute to strengthening resilience equitably and building sustainable capacity.

Louisiana’s Strategic Adaptations for Future Environments: A Multijurisdictional Partnership

Louisiana’s Strategic Adaptations for Future Environments (LA SAFE)¹ provides insights on a multijurisdictional approach to strengthening equitable community resilience. LA SAFE, a joint initiative of the State of Louisiana and the Foundation for Louisiana, provides a holistic and regional approach to addressing climate-induced risks in coastal Louisiana. LA SAFE originated with the state government, engaged at the community level, and partnered with six parishes. This process was designed to include both local residents and multijurisdictional scales of government (local, state, federal). The LA SAFE program resulted in a regional climate adaptation strategy and six parish-level climate adaptation plans. Box 3-3 highlights best practices from the LA SAFE program.

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¹ This effort was funded by National Disaster Resilience Program of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, with support from philanthropic organizations that include the blue moon fund, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. The effort included $47.5 million in project funds and more than 70 engagement activities. For more information, visit https://lasafe.la.gov.

Texas Target Communities: An Academic and Community-Based Partnership

The Texas Target Communities (TxTC) program is a service-learning program for students at Texas A&M University at College Station, and a community engagement initiative, with the stated mission “to facilitate the transformation of communities from high-risk/low-opportunity to equitable, resilient, and adaptive by mitigating threats to the economy, environment, and culture.”⁴ As an academic and community-based partnership program, TxTC seeks to increase the likelihood of community buy-in by providing technical knowledge to the community from a trusted local institution and by building on preexisting relationships and social capital to create and strengthen equitable community resilience.

TxTC employs an inclusive and equitable plan-making process to ensure the project is not developed exclusively by the university and includes active public participation from the affected community to achieve community ownership and investment. Projects range from small efforts of 1 year to more extensive facilitation and engagement efforts that occur over multiple years. See Box 3-4 for best practices gleaned from TxTC.

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⁴ TxTC is an initiative of the College of Architecture, the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, and the Office of the President at Texas A&M University. For information, see https://www.arch.tamu.edu/impact/centers-institutes-outreach/txtc/ (accessed May 24, 2022).

The Gulf Region Health Outreach Program: An Evaluation Enterprise

The Gulf Region Health Outreach Program (GRHOP) highlights the benefits of adopting a flexible, long-term funding structure that can be applied to a select number of concentrated regional projects with a shared mission of enhancing human and environmental health and resilience. The GRHOP was developed jointly by British Petroleum and the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee as part of the Deepwater Horizon Medical Benefits Class Action Settlement. All target beneficiaries of the GRHOP were residents of one of the 17 designated coastal counties

and parishes in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi, and many were uninsured or were from medically underserved communities.⁵

The GRHOP utilized diverse strategies for strengthening local and regional health care, promoting community resilience, and facilitating transparent health information and greater access in underserved areas. One strategy that the GRHOP utilized was supporting community involvement across its portfolio of integrated efforts. Led by the Alliance Institute, this effort worked in conjunction with all other GRHOP-funded projects and provided a shared community involvement platform to learn from all partnership activities and to disseminate best practices, outputs and outcomes, and lessons learned.

GRHOP also participated in a regional public health collaborative, which was initiated and sustained by the Louisiana Public Health Institute to promote synergy among community public health practitioners, local Federally Qualified Health Centers, and local and national academic and practitioner partners. This collaborative provided high-level trainings and opportunities to participate in workshops on topics of shared interest, while increasing cross-agency and cross-stakeholder awareness of lessons learned, challenges, and knowledge of other initiatives. GRHOP projects were positioned in universities within the identified footprint (University of West Florida, University of South Alabama, University of Southern Mississippi, Tulane University, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center) to leverage and reinforce ongoing partnerships in local communities and to facilitate and build new partnerships. The project directors engaged, represented, and partnered with community stakeholders to ensure that funding was allocated equitably and aligned with emerging and aspirational community resilience missions and goals, as well as the existing efforts of health-centered organizations and community health champions (Lichtveld et al., 2017; Sherman et al., 2019a).⁶ The GRHOP was designed to be embedded in, and a complement to, existing efforts undertaken by local, state, and regional public health entities.

Project leaders and other appointed stewards of the GRHOP effort comprised a Coordinating Committee (GRHOP CC), which met quarterly, using a voting procedure to manage emerging controversies and cross-project concerns. These GRHOP CC meetings also promoted synergy, communication, and sustainability of efforts occurring within and across projects. Early work involved adopting shared definitions for key terms, generating and sharing project-specific and GRHOP-enterprise-level logic models, and initiating an enterprise evaluation strategy (Sherman et al., 2019b). Ongoing, objective-specific evaluations were also

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⁵ The 17 named coastal counties and parishes: Alabama (Mobile, Baldwin), Florida (Escambia, Santa Rosa, Walton, Okaloosa, Bay), Louisiana (Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Lafourche, Terrebonne, Cameron), and Mississippi (Hancock, Harrison, Jackson).

⁶ The GRHOP consisted of four integrated projects with the following objectives: build the capacity of primary care community health clinics in the region; increase the mental and behavioral health expertise of health professionals in the targeted communities and increase awareness by local communities of mental and behavioral health issues; increase the environmental health expertise of health professionals in the targeted communities and the health literacy of local communities; and train community health workers who will help residents navigate the healthcare system and access needed care.

conducted collaboratively (Langhinrichsen-Rohling et al., 2017). See Box 3-5 for best practices gleaned from GRHOP.

100 Resilient Cities and the Resilient Cities Catalyst: From a Global Resilience Effort to City and Community Partnerships

100 Resilient Cities (100RC) was a $165 million global effort pioneered by The Rockefeller Foundation in 2013, as part of its Global Centennial Initiative, to build urban

resilience worldwide. An overall intention of 100RC, as principal Michael Berkowitz said to the committee, was to “spark a revolution in the way that cities plan and act through better integration across sectors and silos and through more inclusive, risk-aware and forward looking ways.”⁷ Ultimately, an urban resilience movement would be catalyzed by cities around the world achieving better management of chronic stressors and acute shocks, so that residents, especially vulnerable groups, would be safer and have increased livelihood options. Resilience would be built and enhanced by four main pathways:

1. financial and logistical guidance for establishing the position of chief resilience officer to lead the city’s resilience efforts;
2. expert and technical support to develop a city-wide resilience strategy;
3. access to service providers, and partners from the private, public, and nongovernmental organization sectors who assisted in the development and implementation of the city’s resilience strategies; and
4. membership in a global network of member cities to facilitate city to city learning and support.

The 100RC Selection Process

100RC had a mix of selection criteria that blended quantitative aspects, such as municipal capacity, with qualitative aspects, or what Mr. Berkowitz called, “whites of the eyes meetings,” with mayors and other city leaders to gauge interest, investment, and motivation. Cities submitted applications, and 100RC had technical reviewers use quantitative scorecards to identify about double the number of cities in each of the three rounds of selection that would be eventually selected for the partnership (2013, 2014, 2015). In other words, after the quantitative selection to meet the technical aspects, approximately 60 cities were left and only about 33 would be selected for funding and membership. These 33 were selected after 100RC in-person meetings to determine their fit as a partner and for the network, and to discern their motivations. Applicants also needed to include a sustainability plan that explained how the city would continue its work after the agreed upon amount of funding was spent (e.g., a line item in the city budget for a chief resilience officer; a plan to institutionalize the resilience strategy process rather than just a plan for this one grant). Applicants were also asked to list their community partners (e.g., community-based organizations, nongovernmental organizations, nonprofits) to guarantee a diverse level of collaboration and support across sectors. Finally, 100RC also considered the national and political context to ensure that cities in the same country would have some level of support from each other and have networking opportunities, although some countries only included one 100RC city (e.g., Egypt, Ethiopia, Senegal). Considering this selection process, Mr. Berkowitz suggested that the EnCoRe program be very intentional in its last round of selection to ensure that the community or city is a good fit for the overall portfolio.

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⁷ Comments by Michael Berkowitz, 100RC, in a presentation to the committee on January 11, 2022.

Despite the success of 100RC, Mr. Berkowitz acknowledged that the program had to part ways with several cities of the final 100. The principal reasons for ending the partnership were divergent visions of urban resilience; different motivations for becoming partners; and in some cases, mayoral transitions that introduced different priorities. In all of these, Mr. Berkowitz stressed the reciprocal nature of partnerships and the ability for the funding organization to be agile and flexible at both the broader program level and with specific partners. See Box 3-6 for best practices gleaned from 100RC.

The Resilient Cities Catalyst in Houston

The Resilient Cities Catalyst (RCC) is a legacy initiative of 100RC that partners with cities and communities with a principal focus on enhancing partnerships between community groups and local governments. The committee heard from Corinne LeTourneau, who was one of the founding principals of RCC and the former managing director for the North American region

of 100RC. One of the biggest challenges from Ms. LeTourneau’s experience with 100RC in North American cities both large and small was the inability for local governments to meaningfully engage with their community partners. The root of the problem was that most projects did not include a codesign process from the start, and engagement and community input started at the tail end of the process when the project was almost fully developed. The challenge was that if a project was only partially developed and its feasibility unknown, then it risked significant setbacks and potential failure. Additionally, procedural equity was difficult to institutionalize in large-scale climate and infrastructure resilience projects, which often required the collaboration of a multitude of city agencies during design and implementation. To address this challenge, the RCC focused on the neighborhood scale and used the concept of a resiliency district to test out solutions.

The presentation focused on the specific example of RCC’s partnership with Houston. Ms. LeTourneau was joined by Ms. Laura Patiño, City of Houston deputy chief resilience and sustainability officer, and Ms. Huey German-Wilson, program director from a community-based organization called the Northeast Houston Redevelopment Council (NHRC). In the specific example of Houston, JPMorgan Chase funded both RCC to implement a resilience district and NHRC for community development projects. The dual funding catalyzed a partnership between RCC and NHRC, whereby RCC brought capacity and technical expertise and NHRC brought local knowledge, trust, and vision to ensure that projects they partnered on would be successful and meaningful at the community scale. RCC and NHRC collaborated on a resilient neighborhoods pilot program in the Kashmere Gardens neighborhood. The pilot project created a community resilience and resource hub, known as a “Lily Pad,” as a way to do community outreach while centering the effort within the community (Figure 3-1). See Box 3-7 for best practices gleaned from the RCC and NHRC partnership.

THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION’S NAVIGATING THE NEW ARCTIC

Program: Cultural Competency as a National Funding Organization

The National Science Foundation (NSF) established the Navigating the New Arctic (NNA) Initiative in 2017 to “empower new research partnerships from local to international scales, diversify the next generation of Arctic researchers, enhance efforts in formal and informal education, and integrate the co-production of knowledge where appropriate” (NNA, n.d., para. 1). In 2020, through a formal letter to NSF, numerous Indigenous Tribes and tribal organizations that represent a large portion of western Alaska and communities along the Bering Sea provided strong feedback that identified a disconnect between resource managers, policy makers, academics, agencies, and communities. The letter called for meaningful access to, and participation in, the research process to ensure that issues are addressed in locally relevant and respectful ways (see also Yua et al., 2022).⁸ The letter expressed grave concerns about the

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⁸ See the “Navigating the New Arctic NSF Comment Letter,” available at https://kawerak.org/natural-resources/social-science/. The Tribes and tribal organization signatories of the letter include (1) Kawerak Incorporated: the Alaska Native nonprofit tribal consortium for the 20 federally recognized Tribes of the Bering Strait region; (2) the Association of Village Council Presidents: the regional nonprofit Tribal consortium for 56 Alaska Native villages in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta; (3) the Bering Sea Elders Group: an association of elder

impacts from the NNA process and funded projects. NSF’s NNA program responded by creating the NNA Community Office (NNA, n.d.; see Figure 3-2), revising their Arctic Research Opportunities program solicitation,⁹ and strategizing other ways to improve the inclusion of local and Indigenous voices at every stage of the partnership process (NSF, 2021). Examining the correspondence between these two entities and the changes made to NSF’s NNA program, as well as hearing firsthand from the director of the NNA Community Office, Matthew Druckenmiller, during a public data-gathering session, provided valuable lessons learned and guiding principles for the committee to consider as it formulated its core recommendations for the EnCoRe initiative (see Chapter 4). NSF’s decision to translate the feedback of local and Indigenous voices into tangible, structural change to their engagement approach provides an opportunity for EnCoRe to learn from NSF’s evolution. The diagram in Figure 3-2 represents how the NNA Community Office is distributed across three main locations, with various affiliate centers and both nontribal and tribally controlled extension offices for research, education and outreach. The recommendations from arctic Tribes and tribal organizations to NSF focused on issues of food security and community infrastructure, changes in the process for request for proposals, increased input from Indigenous communities, and efforts to make broader impacts and to incorporate equitably a coproduction-of-knowledge approach.

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representatives appointed by 38 Tribes in the Yukon-Kuskokwim and Bering Strait regions, and (4) the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island: a federally designated name used to identify the community of Unangan, also known as Aleuts, residing on St. Paul Island.

⁹ For more information, see NSF’s “Arctic Research Opportunities” (https://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf21526 [accessed June 30, 2022]).