Resiliency is the word of the hour, a potent but ill-defined term of art in climate and community development circles. At its most fundamental, resiliency indicates a community's ability to withstand a shock--economic, environmental, social. It encompasses a community's work to avert, prepare for, respond to, and recover from a disaster. It is invoked, most commonly, in the aftermath of droughts, storms, wildfire, or floods--the kinds of cataclysm that annually cost billions of dollars to the US economy and untold suffering to its citizens. But resiliency is not the sad story of national decline. Nor can it be reduced to tales of episodic heroism in the face of hostile and impersonal forces of nature. It is, rather, a vision of municipalities around the country reinventing themselves as economically and environmentally vibrant centers of community self-reliance. America's community colleges belong at the heart of this narrative. This Guide aims to put them there.

A Missing Link

Hundreds, if not thousands, of cities, states, and regions have developed climate adaptation or resiliency plans; few have consulted community colleges in developing them. Most plans call for improvements in education and training, and connection to local economic development, but none of dozens that we reviewed offer a concrete agenda for local workforce development. The major missing piece in these resiliency initiatives: The community college.

Community leaders and elected officials, along with planners and scientists and other resiliency principals, should be calling on local colleges to help mobilize the community and train its workers.

Public engagement in resiliency will turn on livelihoods, not science. Post-disaster redevelopment efforts aimed at public safety need to think also about economic prosperity, which shores up a community as much as sound bridges and reliable transportation. Jobs matter. As high-level resiliency planning pours millions and even billions (as in the case of post-Sandy efforts) of dollars into local redevelopment, who will ensure that the jobs go to local residents in impacted communities, and who is going to train them to do the work? Resilience requires updating the educational infrastructure to meet the technical demands of rebuilding--and preferably reinventing--the country's physical infrastructure. This cannot be done without the active participation of its community and technical colleges.

Wherever local decision-makers fail to see the importance of skill delivery in building resilient communities, college presidents and trustees should make this case. And every community college needs to pay close attention to emerging opportunities in community resilience planning. Because every college is sitting at the center of a community that is already or soon will be facing challenges from economic and climatic shifts. Each college should be asking itself: How can we add value and voice to the response network, investing in joint initiatives to draw in federal and philanthropic support? How many technical occupations for which we are already educating and training will be impacted by how our region takes shape over the next decade in response to climate change? This Guide points the way to some answers.

Into Action: Building Resilience

This Guide is designed to help college and community leaders establish a framework for dialogue and action on local climate resiliency.

The Introduction (Chapter 1) links the goals of 21stcentury community college--equity, access, completion--to the emerging national movement to build resilient communities. Here we explore the scope of the challenge, including the sobering economics of extreme weather, and offer a glossary of related but often confusing terms--mitigation, adaption, vulnerability. And we ask:

What does it mean, exactly, to build resilience? What are its determinants? The answer lies in many factors, some elusive: Critical intangibles like social cohesion, for example, and concrete imperatives like a functional communications infrastructure.

The term climate resilience tends to invoke conversations about infrastructure. We are inundated with images of submerged houses, washed out roads, downed power lines, collapsed bridges. And it's common knowledge that this country needs to repair its crumbling built environment, disaster or not. So the energy around resiliency puts a welcome focus on infrastructure--not just rebuilding it, but reinventing it through greener transit and power and building; sturdier substations, sewer systems, and cell towers--the new bones of an innovative, adaptive America.

Beyond bricks and mortar (or swale and dune), we should also think of resilient infrastructure in terms of more efficient and effective systems for skill delivery, health care, food production, and emergency response.

And there are other matters, equally important.

Building resilience is something more than building sea walls (projected to be a $9B industry in the next decade) and raising roads. Resiliency relies on social cohesion. At its most basic, this means the ability to rely on one's neighbors, which of course runs headlong into this country's potent culture of self-reliance. On a more sophisticated level, however, social cohesion can reflect--and demand--shared power and opportunity, another classic American ideal. Locally, cohesiveness is a function of trust and respect, and is built through informal networks in civil society--congregations, classrooms, neighborhoods, family. Building an individual's or community's social capital--measured in part by the extent of their networks--leads to a sense of agency, of power, of some measure of control over decisions that affect their lives and livelihoods. Which is why building resilience requires community engagement.

A city or state can enhance its physical resilience to climate change by upgrading material infrastructure and improving management of natural capital. A society becomes resilient through improvements in median income, education, health, and wealth, and equal opportunity to participate in and benefit from the activity that produces them. If opportunity, then, is a primary adaptive strategy, community colleges are clearly positioned to play a leading role.

Resources and Opportunities: How Local Colleges Can Engage in a National Dialogue

Indeed, while this report is about changing weather, it is not about weathering change. The point is not to bounce back, but-particularly in low-income communities already battered by high unemployment, chronic disease, and environmental decay--to leap forward. So while we write about disaster preparedness, response, and recovery, we are at the same time addressing demands for something larger: vision and leadership and empowerment. Hence the critical role of community colleges--in related curriculum and career pathways, in community leadership and networking, in campus creativity and practice.

Institutions and communities around the country are joining together to create local food systems, urban forests, solar gardens; to redefine land use, integrate transit, green infrastructure, and improve community health networks; to reinvent education by building career pathways that move workers of all skill levels into family sustaining jobs while improving the climate resilience of the neighborhoods in which they live.

In and around this local activity runs an emergent national dialogue on resilient systems. Inquiry and investment have begun to flow in earnest from federal agencies and local governments, philanthropy and academia, labor, business, and non-profit organizations with concerns ranging from environmental justice to national security. In particular, the past few years have witnessed a wave of serious attention to cities as centers of innovation.

This resiliency conversation--and the useful tools it is generating for officials, planners, industries, and activists (including, e.g., adaptation plans, risk assessments, policy recommendations, and engagement strategies)--inevitably, at some point, raises or begs the question of jobs and training. And inevitably stops short of details.

Community colleges have the answers. Some are already at the table; more need to be.

Chapter 2 sets the table, looking at the state and local openings where colleges can enter this conversation, and lifting up opportunities emerging nationally in sectors as diverse as energy, water, housing, hazard mitigation, and healthcare. It also describes, for community leaders in public and private sectors, the critical role of community and technical colleges in building local resilience. The community college model offers a unique combination of practical, applied education and nimble, interdisciplinary, learning. It is here, in this very American institution, that we are most likely to design a new way of working that brings resilience into a community-focused future. And it is here, in a system founded on principles of local empowerment, that we can find an institutional basis for social cohesion. On a more tactical level, community colleges are ideally situated to be community leaders in the resiliency space: they can and do disseminate reliable information on the social and economic impacts of climate change, help communities prioritize their needs in the context of resiliency, and provide critical material support in times of crisis.

Leadership, Innovation, and Resilience: A Practical Framework for Transformative Change

Chapter 3 dives into what all of this means for the individual community college, with particular attention to jobs and economic development.

Adaptation to global climate disruption, in the U.S. and around the world, will involve job creation and dissolution, as well as a concomitant shift in skills across the economy. While we don't know exactly what this looks like, we do know that it demands a cross-sectoral approach--all occupational and educational programs need to determine which elements of work and learning contribute to resiliency--and a holistic one, in which colleges splice resiliency and whole-systems thinking into the very DNA of the institution and its programs of study. It is less a matter of teaching engineers to build green vs. grey infrastructure than of adjusting the entire way that the nation's problem-solvers are taught to think. It is about creating the educational environment that fosters expansive and imaginative new approaches to solving the infrastructure challenges of tightly interconnected systems. Resiliency will not demand eponymous technicians. It will, however, require technically-trained experts of every sort: front-line workers in health and construction, urban planners and civil engineers, landscape designers and installers, farmers and food system entrepreneurs. Training for a resilient future will be benchmarked in large part by technical diplomas, apprenticeships, and associates and applied bachelor's degrees. Public services, community health, urban infrastructure, emergency response--these are industry sectors in which a preponderance of workers are trained in community colleges.

In addition to considering the necessary response of community colleges to the job and training impacts of resiliency in specific industry sectors, this chapter looks at the role of the college as community leader and campus innovator. It includes a framework for action in each of these spaces. Not simply theoretical, this framework--a practical resiliency agenda--considers jobs, economic development, training partnerships, and evolving programs of study in case studies of five areas: energy efficiency, emergency response, green infrastructure, healthcare, and cross-sector planning for student success. Each tells the same story: college presidents, administrators, and faculty need to assess the relevance of coursework and campus initiatives, and, more importantly, step into their role as community leaders on climate resilience.

Finally, in Conclusion, the Guide outlines critical next steps, including:

• Resiliency leadership training for community college presidents and trustees
• A resiliency prioritization and planning rubric for community and technical colleges
• A framework and action plan to connect community and college resiliency efforts

Towards a Resiliency Agenda for the 21st-Century Community College

The initiatives described in this Guide only hint at the rich field of action and possibility for community colleges willing to engage the great work before us: building resiliency. The resiliency conversation, while urgent, is young. This paper intends only to frame the subject, not forge a set of clear and comprehensive answers. Community colleges, we hope, will in fact rewrite the questions. In the meantime, a few lessons emerge, suggesting directions for engagement.

In Programming

• Integrate resilient systems-thinking into every program of study, and develop curricula responsive to the particular skill implications of local climate adaptation and mitigation initiatives.
• Update existing coursework in emergency response, public service, urban planning, engineering, information technology, landscape, water, construction, environment, health, and transportation programs; and seek interdisciplinary opportunities between them.
• Pay attention to emerging opportunities nationally and regionally (including, e.g., 111(d), ACA, and the Administration's Climate Action Plan) as policy changes open doors for collaboration, action, and funding.
• Build climate resilience through education and training: Review local and regional adaptation plans and populate the vague sections on workforce development with an actual agenda for skill delivery.
• Build community resilience through economic opportunity: Work with local industry partnerships, high schools, and community programs (e.g. pre-apprenticeship, adult literacy, English language learning, and employment readiness) to align education with demand, establish or expand stackable credentials, and build career pathways to actual jobs.
• Join labor-management partnerships in training incumbent workers for advancement; seize the resiliency dialogue as an opportunity to improve college relationships with labor unions and other worker institutions.
• Define climate resiliency for your region; work with local government, workforce intermediaries, and industry partnerships to assess emerging labor market demand and skill needs driven by climate resiliency initiatives.
• Explore new partnerships in customized training for incoming and incumbent city and county workers, particularly in environmental services, engineering, urban planning, transportation, emergency response, and public health.
• Above all, hew to the college's core mission, and share it with all community stakeholders: Post-secondary success leads to economic opportunity, and initiatives to advance it should thus be a keystone strategy in the architecture of community resilience.

On Campus

• Become a living laboratory of resilience; use the campus as a demonstration and teaching asset for engaging students and the community, modeling, for example, stormwater management or renewable energy systems.
• Fortify and expand sustainability work--both mitigation and adaptation initiatives--already happening across campuses; use existing college sustainability committees to initiate and expand the resiliency conversation.
• Align college adaptation and hazard mitigation planning, which colleges are already required to do, with local and regional efforts.
• Establish the campus as a safe haven--whether this is because of high ground, microgrids, or weaponfree zones--and a stable, reliable operations center for times of crisis.
• Enhance campus awareness and preparedness through education, training, and simulations; develop an all-hazards response plan that engages and supports the different capacities for resilience of individuals on campus: administrators, faculty, staff, and students.
• Insert resiliency conversations into campus planning on green initiatives; and also work to embed resiliency in institutional strategic planning at every level.
• Build on the last decade's advances in sustainability education to prepare students to help their own communities mitigate and adapt to the most severe impacts of climate change.
• Assess vulnerability and prepare adaptive responses in collaboration with other community colleges around the country: Join the Alliance for Resilient Campuses (see page 13 [of the report]).

With Community

• Colleges are anchor institutions and community assets that can serve as regional catalysts in the movement to build resilient places. Prepare campuses not only to be an operations base during a disaster, but to serve as an operational base for quotidian community transformation.
• Use the bully pulpit to explore resiliency--its imperatives and its possibilities--with a broad audience.
• Provide educational resources on climate change and adaptation to the community at large.
• Partner with community groups; mediate conversations to ensure that outsiders bearing resilience plans build up and onto local projects and priorities--which may or may not go under the formal title of "resilience."
• Broker conversations. Adaptation strategies developed in rooms dominated by scientists and environmentalists tend to seek technical solutions to social problems; community groups will return the resiliency dialogue to community health and economic inclusiveness.
• Practice local workforce development in new ways--work with cities and transit authorities and regional planning bodies in addition to individual employers.
• Include all voices. Community activists and environmental justice groups need to share power with economic development and employer interests; colleges have the clout to keep everyone at the big table--where the investment decisions are made--when some seek to busy the more plebeian voices with tangential "community" conversations.
• Convene scientists, industry and community leaders, and policy-makers to shape climate action plans and determine workforce implications; Make the college visible as an essential partner in any resiliency planning process.

Sarah White is a Senior Associate at the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS). Todd Cohen is the Director of American Association of Community College's Sustainability Education and Economic Development (SEED) Center.

Editor's note: This issue of Learning Abstracts is the Executive Summary from the American Association of Community Colleges publication, A Guide to Climate Resiliency & the Community College.

Opinions expressed in Learning Abstracts are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the League for Innovation in the Community College.