ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the emergence of community resilience in policy, planning, and practice. It explores the meaning of community resilience, its distinction from personal resilience, the focus on adaptation, characteristics of disaster-resilient communities, and measurement issues. The chapter describes strategies for building community resilience to disasters and the Communities Advancing Resilience Toolkit a community intervention designed to enhance community resilience and illustrates the principles in strategy development and implementation. Community resilience has become part of the lexicon of disaster readiness, response, and recovery. Community resilience is not merely a collection of personally resilient individuals responding individually to a particular adversity. The chapter describes seven strategies are foster economic development, stimulate strengths-based community development, know the community and share that knowledge, bolster connections, adopt a holistic wellness focus, undertake effective disaster management and create a consciousness of community resilience. Economic development is a concern for virtually all communities.
