The Community Resilience Manual

Since 1998, with the assistance of a number of funding agencies and other contributors, CCCR has been exploring the concept of community resilience. At issue is the economic and social vitality of rural communities across Canada and the United States. Many have deteriorated in the past decade due to drastic changes in mining, the forest industry, agriculture, and fisheries.

Yet others have prospered. They have taken steps that have enabled them to survive crisis, influence change, and become healthy, vital places for their citizens. What must we learn from their success?

On the basis of research into proven strategies of socio-economic revitalization, including its own experience as a practitioner of community-based economic development (CED), the CCCR developed a model of community resilience. This model expresses in terms of 23 resilience characteristics a community's capacity to shape its own ways of life and work. (Find this in the manual's Guide.)

The Centre also designed and field-tested a process by which small towns could use this model cost-effectively to assess their situation, and focus their economic and social planning accordingly. (Find this in the manual's Workbook.) Also included is the Bibliography of sources used to create the Guide and Manual.

To keep abreast of more recent developments in our community resilience work, subscribe to i4, the free ejournal of the CCCR.