ResilienceCommunity-Based Solutions to Enhance Disaster Resilience

In partnership with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced $15.9 million in awards to teams comprising civic partners such as local, state, and tribal officials and non-profit and community leaders to conduct and evaluate ready-to-implement pilot projects that address community-identified challenges.

The NSF says that gaps in equality and natural disasters can have a widespread impact, but the effects are seen and felt most sharply at the community level, when neighbors are the ones suffering. The Civic Innovation Challenge is designed to find community-based solutions to these challenges and make them sustainable, scalable and transferrable to other communities – from large to small and from rural to urban – across the US.

Stage 1 of the Civic Innovation Challenge awarded planning grants to 52 teams across 30 states as well as tribal regions, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. to refine concepts for projects designed to address use-inspired issues in their communities.

In Stage 2, 17 of those teams have been selected for awards of up to $1 million to conduct and evaluate ready-to-implement pilot projects in a 12-month timeframe. Teams will also collaborate across the entire program, sharing approaches and positioning projects to have wider impact.

“We applaud the efforts of all the teams who worked tirelessly to build partnerships between researchers and community stakeholders,” said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. “We are excited to see the teams selected for the next phase begin their pilot projects and plant seeds of innovation across the country. This program demonstrates the value of research-community partnerships in rapidly translating cutting-edge science into community-based innovation and we look forward to seeing its positive impact across urban and rural communities.”

The Civic Innovation Challenge is comprised of two tracks. Track A, funded by NSF and DOE, focuses on communities and mobility, specifically offering better mobility options to solve the spatial mismatch between affordable housing and jobs, as well as access to services like food and childcare.

Track B, funded by NSF and DHS, focuses on resilience to natural disasters in the context of equipping communities for greater preparedness to and response after disasters such as floods, hurricanes and wildfires. Eleven selected projects will develop artificial intelligence-based decision support tools for food distribution during disasters, improve the post-flood financial resiliency of low-income households, address the resilience divide in rural communities through rural resilience hubs, just to name a few.