Last week, we released the first layer of our Roadmap to Recovery, a guide for communities seeking local or regional economic recovery and resilience. The first layer, Laying the Groundwork, positions communities for success by creating a foundation of strong leadership, engagement, assessment, and direction for their efforts.
Below is an additional resource to help your community through the early stages of recovery. Click the button at the bottom of the page to receive a set of slides that we use to walk communities through important discussions about:
Recovery Outcomes
It’s really important to have a conversation about what your community wants out of its recovery efforts. Many communities, however, fail at taking this first step effectively. Too often, community recovery goals are established by one or two people, leading to goals that aren’t representative of the people who live and work there. If your community is already deep into its recovery efforts, it’s not too late to step back and have a broader conversation about what you want to accomplish.
*Tip: If your community is building strategies for short, mid, and/ or long term recovery, it’s ideal to talk about outcomes for all timelines. Start with short term and move towards long term.
Process Outcomes
While the conversation about recovery outcomes is about results and impact, process outcomes are about how you approach your recovery planning efforts. Are you hoping to strengthen collaboration with neighboring jurisdictions? Build trust between elected officials and the community? Ensure the whole of the community is engaged in the discussion? These are process outcomes. Talking about them at this stage will help you design your approach to achieve goals along the way.
Assessing Leadership
Leadership and management are critical to the success of your efforts. However, it can be difficult to decide who should be “leading” this type of project. Since most recovery efforts will only succeed with effective collaboration between different partners, it is important to assess how local or regional partners work together. Are there capacity gaps that need to be filled? Are there entities or partners who are not yet engaged that should be? An honest assessment of your community’s leadership and collaboration capacity will be helpful in identifying how to structure your efforts.
Are you ready to facilitate conversations with your community leaders about desired outcomes for your recovery efforts?
Click Here for Facilitation Slides
