Resilience is a community’s ability to adapt and thrive in changing conditions instead of collapsing during a shock. Resilience is not about “bouncing back.” Instead, it is about “bouncing forward” to eradicate the inequities and unsustainable resource use at the heart of the many crises we face, including climate, equity, and democracy.
Two TRCC member organizations define “resilience” in more depth.
- Resilience: The ability of a community to maintain and evolve its identity in the face of both short-term and long-term changes while cultivating environmental, social, and economic sustainability. (Post Carbon Institute, Six Foundations for Building Community Resilience)
- Resilience: Climate Change Mitigation + Adaptation + Deep Democracy.
- Mitigation: stopping the harm by lowering greenhouse gas emissions
- Adaptation: adjustments in ecological, social, or economic systems to lower the risk of climatic changes
- Deep Democracy: those most affected by decisions make those decisions because they live with the consequences. From a climate perspective, deep democracy is led by the “front-line” low-income communities and communities of color who end up with the oil refineries, coal mining, waste incinerators, etc. in their backyards.
- (from the Movement Strategy Center with TRCC member Movement Generation, The Pathways to Resilience (P2R) Dialogues)