Climate and Community Resilience

Each month, we’ll share a short exploration about a concept, principle, or lens that informs our work at Design for Peace, and a story of where dynamic, sustainable peace is emerging in our communities. This month, we explore various perspectives on what it means to nurture places of community resilience, with a special focus on climate resilience.

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What is community resilience?

By Anna Czarnik-Neimeyer

This much is clear: we are living in a time of profound and repeated shocks to human systems that, for many, have helped the world to feel more stable, predictable and ordered. This reality becomes harder to ignore every time our ecosystem breaks another unprecedented record, when the news cycle reports another political earthquake, when our local institutions feel ill-equipped to adapt to a world in profound change.

How do we design for peace in such a time? 

One of the ways that we are exploring this question is to focus less on strategic plans - that tend to make assumptions that our context will stay the same - and more on nurturing places of community resilience. 

Resilience is a characteristic of a community that combines a variety of factors: Spiritual & Emotional resilience includes pastoral and spiritual support for mental health services; Material & Physical resilience ensures access to food, clean water, healthy air, warmth or cooling; Social & Relational resilience means knowing and trusting our neighbors, sharing our resources, and depending on interconnected networks to withstand challenge.

But there’s more here - we believe that beyond simply ‘bouncing back’ after a shock, nurturing resilience offers us the chance to ‘bounce forward’, to actively envision and cultivate communities of more dynamic peace than before. 

This is the promise of building resilient communities!  

Many of the partners we work with around this are local churches, who traditionally are comfortable offering “Spiritual + Emotional” practices like worship & pastoral care, and sometimes in “Material + Physical” practices like food banks, affordable housing, and warming shelters. For many, however, it is a growing edge for them to nurture the social & relational practice of knowing their neighbors deeply, understanding the needs & lives of people who live there, and building trust over time with the community outside the church. 

Social and relational connection is crucial for climate resilience, unlocking resources that get tied up in closed systems, and moving them to where they are needed most. This is where we invest our energy with congregations, working with them to earn trust and develop accountable local relationships.

If you’re curious about building resilience together, we invite you to connect with Anna by sending us a message here: wedesignforpeace.org/connect

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Climate Resilience Webinar Series

This year, we hosted four webinars exploring the technical, spiritual, and social aspects of building contextual climate resilience hubs. Practitioners, artists, authors, and partners from across the Pacific Northwest discussed topics including: Solar Power, Indigenous Perspectives, Church Forests, and Feeding Ministries. 

Watch these webinars to learn more about how your faith community could build climate resilience in your context. You can view the recordings here and at: wedesignforpeace.org/videos

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