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Resilient Community Journal: June 18, 2009

By Justin Long ⋅ June 18, 2009 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

One of the things I am hunting for right now is the characteristics/tools/attributes of a resilient community, as well as particular examples of resilient communities. A resilient community is my ideal of a local geographic area that has been transformed or has reached its ideal sustainable operating condition: something that the Kingdom should be about. This “domain” is still being explored.

Definitions

A resilient community should at least be:

• pastoral, supporting new births and new member recruitment. For larger communities, the greatest force of new membership is “demographic”: people being born into a community, or people migrating in because of family or intimate friend connections. A resilient community should be able to encourage and support this kind of growth.

• endure rapidly propagating global shocks (THE GREAT REBOOT). This is the big argument for ‘localization,’ so that a community is not dependent on the global community for life-sustaining resources.

• sustainable: able to produce the resources it needs. We often outsource our resource production to cheaper places, but if a community cannot provide the resources it needs on its own (food, water, shelter, clothing, transportation, health, government, education, religion), then if these resources for any reason aren’t available from another distant resource the community is in jeopardy.

• efficient and low-cost: communities that cannot compete with other communities will lose members; every member lost reduces the value of the community and its ability to compete.

What other definitions need to be incorporated?

Journal

• Africa has a ‘hidden famine’ of books: an educational famine. Is education an important factor in resilience?
• The International Consortium for Organizational Resilience defines a Resilient Community as: (1) having sober, almost pessimistic views on those aspects of reality necessary for survival; (2) calling on enduring values to find meaning in hardship; (3) use whatever’s handy to overcome hardship. It goes further to talk about specific attributes of resilient communities.

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