When Community Resilience to Extreme Weather (CREW) decided to pilot a neighbourhood resiliency map for Toronto’s Wards 13 & 14 it asked Jose A. Lao and Santessa Henriques for help. Resiliency is the ability of a community to cope with extreme stressors, make the very best of them, and bounce back afterwards. It sounds straightforward but measuring it is not so simple.
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Often as charities we take pride in how we are able to stretch limited financial resources to help the maximum amount of people. This is something that charitable organizations should be proud of, yet its a mindset that I believe should be changed.
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How many “resilient streets” does it take to make a resilient neighbourhood or community? This is one of the questions that the Building Resilient Neighbourhoods Project of Victoria BC has been exploring since 2014. Resilient Streets was born out of a year of piloting ways to engage neighbours with each other for the purpose of strengthening household and neighbourhood resilience. The goal was to get “beyond the block party” and find ways to increase connectedness, co-operation, a sense of agency, and a sharing economy among neighbours. Our Resilient Streets Toolkit, published in 2013, shared an array of different ways to support neighbour connectivity and action, based on our belief that the more options people have, the more likely they are to engage and connect.
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People who are members of disability royalty, and that include staff, funders, policy makers as well as individuals, families, and friends, are by definition in it for the long haul. Their lobbying, petitioning and advocacy will continue for a lifetime. Chances are they will be engaged with the same people and the same departments more than once or twice. That makes it even more important to pay attention to their individual and collective reputation.
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A fundamental principle of community organizing is to start where the people are. The closer you engage people to where they live, the more likely they are to get involved. You should be able to get successively larger turnouts for gatherings at the neighborhood, city, state and national levels, but the percentage of the population engaged will most likely be the highest at the street, block, building or floor level.
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The CommuniTEA Infusion experience is essentially a mobile tea house that comes to a neighbourhood street and creates a kind of town square where people can come together, get to know each other better and strengthen connections. One reason this is important in our fast paced society today, is that fewer persons are connected in meaningful ways with community. If however the gathering place comes right to your door, there is a greater chance for meaningful exchange to take place.
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