Benchmarking Community Resiliency

The seeming nonstop occurrence of natural and man-made disasters has highlighted how poorly prepared most communities are to deal with catastrophes. The speaker will present a new, first-generation methodology that allows officials to model and assess the resiliency of a community. By building off of this information, it is possible to gain useful insights into the community's current level of preparedness, insight into areas of weakness, and an understanding of short- and long-term steps that should be taken to increase readiness and sustainability. While geographical communities such as cities and towns are obvious candidates for this model, the methodology can be used with many other types of communities. The commercial implications of this method will also be explored.

Who should attend: Anyone involved in community governance or planning, strategic planners concerned with the viability of their supply chain, and long-range strategists who might find ways to apply this methodology to other benchmarking challenges.

What you’ll learn: Attendees will be exposed to a number of United Nations studies on vulnerability measurement, including key points from the Japanese conference that led to the "Hyogo Framework for Action 2005 to 2015." Several useful models, including risk assessment and recovery priorities, will be introduced. The key element of this presentation is a discussion of a new methodology that can immediately be applied to any community to measure and compare its level of resiliency and preparedness.

How this new knowledge can be applied: This methodology will allow community planners to correctly assess their state of preparedness and make decisions on how to improve their level readiness for a wide variety of threats.

Donald Byrne, president and CEO, Metrix411, which specializes in online assessments tools and business benchmarking; adjunct faculty, several colleges including Boston University, Bedford, New Hampshire

key words: benchmarking, modeling, methodology, community, resiliency

issue areas: Governance and Communities