Community Resilience Center Resources
Per the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN), community resilience centers (or resilience hubs) are community-serving facilities that:
- support residents and
- coordinate resource distribution and services before, during, or after a natural hazard event.
An important aspect of developing a community resilience center (CRC) is ensuring that the building's power system is resilient during power outages and emergencies. This ensures critical loads such as heating, cooling, and lighting remain powered and services can still be provided to residents.
BayREN's Integrated Energy Services (IES) program helps local governments make energy and resilience upgrades to their public buildings. Our Energy Concierge service connects local governments with available incentive, financing, and technical assistance programs to support these types of building upgrades. Our Energy Roadmapping service provides local governments with custom energy roadmaps for their buildings, including CRCs, with targeted recommendations to improve energy efficiency and resilience.
In addition to these services, BayREN has compiled a list of resources and tools to support local governments in developing and operating CRCs for their communities. Additional resources will continue to be added over time.
Resources
- BayREN's Resilient Libraries Network Equitable Community Engagement Training video provides an overview of CRCs and best practices for equitable community engagement to help inform CRC goals.
- BayREN's Community Conversations Guide (developed in partnership with the American Society of Adaptation Professionals) provides examples of prompting and probing questions that can be used for community engagement conversations to develop CRC goals.
- BayREN's Critical Needs Worksheet can be used to help plan for what critical needs the CRC will need to meet and what types of building features, services, and programming will need to be included as part of the development of the CRC.