Community Resilience Assessment - Meeting the Challenge - the Development of the Conjoint Community Resiliency Assessment

Community resiliency is a term commonly used to describe the ability of a community to endure and survive crisis situations. It encompasses the community’s adaptability to changing circumstances and its capability to respond effectively. As such, it is considered to be an essential capacity for emergency preparedness and readiness to respond. While preparedness is often linked to immediate needs, resiliency has prospects for a longer time span, thus it is associated with sustainability and is relevant in routine as well as in emergency situations. Despite the abundance of material on this subject matter, a thorough search of the literature found no practical tools for the assessment of community resiliency. The acknowledgement that resiliency is a complex issue, entailing input from multiple perspectives is beyond the scope of any single discipline, and leads to a unique cooperation between expert professionals and community leaders (stakeholders) forming the Conjoint Community Resilience Assessment Collaboration with the aim of developing a standard measurement tool for community resiliency. This chapter outlines the evolution and the activities of the collaboration, the milestones and path to the Conjoint Community Resilience Assessment Measure - a novel multidisciplinary tool that incorporates the diverse aspects of community resiliency into a community profile. The profile includes aspects such as: leadership, collective efficacy, preparedness, place attachment, and social trust. The CCRAM standardizes measurements and facilitates comparisons of community resiliency across time and place. In this chapter we will briefly review the theoretical background, portray the elements that were considered, and illustrate the process which led to the final validated instrument.