What is a Community Resilience Hub?
What are Hubs?
They are community-led or operated physical spaces (usually an existing building) used to help communities meet many different needs and goals.
How do they serve communities?
They allow communities to become more self-determined, connected and resilient.
Who runs them?
Primarily community members or community-based organizations, but can be supported by local government agencies, private institutions or companies, universities, and non-profit organizations.
Are Hubs emergency shelters?
For this project, their purpose is meant to be supplemental to the Department of Emergency Management designated shelter system. Though temporary sheltering, child, and elderly care may be a HUB function depending on the site.
Resilience Hubs operate during “blue skies” and “gray skies” (emergencies) and offer a suite of essential services to the community. CRHs operate at varying capacities depending on the host organization and available resources. Some hubs support by providing basic food and emergency medical supplies (Level I), while others serve as a physical gathering place and centralized location for coordinating aid and distributing essential goods and critical services to a larger area. See Figure 2. for examples of the different levels of operation.
Across the country, as the need has grown, the Community Resilience “model” has spread as a new way to organize and prepare for natural disasters. These Hubs, though often run by an existing non-profit, often operate in collaboration with local government and serve the immediate and surrounding neighborhoods. Together, CRHs are able to support each other by forming a regional-level (or islandwide in our case) resilience network.
Our goal for CERENE is to support this growing network of Community Resilience Hubs (“Hubs”) on O’ahu and help facilitate conversations regarding specific needs associated with new CRHs here. In our Action 15 Community Resilience Hub research with the City and County Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resilience we are seeking to discover the ways in which CRHs will coordinate with local non-profits, aid organizations, educational facilities and government agencies.
There will likely be many different styles of Hubs that emerge in Hawaii to reflect the many different configurations of people and places in different neighborhoods across the island.
Cuong Tran, a recent graduate of the University of Hawaii at Manoa in the Department of Urban and Regional planning, and one of our Action 15 Team members, recently discovered in his thesis work that there are different kinds of strengths neighborhoods look to depending on if they are more rurally based or located in the primary urban center.
You can read more about his research findings HERE, and you can follow updates to the Action 15 Research by signing-up for our Listserv Here!
Learn More about Resilience Hubs Here
Listen to a great presentation from our friend Aubry in Baltimore.
Aubry Germ is the Climate and Resilience Planner for the City of Baltimore. She has been working with the resilience hubs there since 2013 and presents and excellent overview of her work.
Literature and More Links
Teeples, E. J. (2024). Neighborhood-Scale Solutions for Community Resilience in Hawaiʻi: Supporting Networks of Resilience with the Built Environment (Doctoral dissertation, University of Hawai’i at Manoa). https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/d13b264c-bf7d-439c-a418-362f9733a35a/content
Tran, C. (2022). The Development of an Asset-Based Framework for Resilience Hub Planning in Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi (Master’s thesis, University of Hawai’i at Manoa). https://cerenehawaii.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Tran2022Resilience-Hubs-Thesis.pdf
USDN (Urban Sustainability Directors Network) Resilience Hubs Overview Website: http://resilience-hub.org/the-opportunity/
USDN (Urban Sustainability Directors Network) Resilience Hubs White Paper: https://www.usdn.org/resilience-hubs.html
USDN Resilience Hubs Development Guide: http://resilience-hub.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/USDN_ResilienceHubsGuidance-1.pdf
Hawai’i Island Resilience Hubs. (n.d.) . See more at https://www.vibranthawaii.org.
Seattle Emergency Hubs. (n.d.). See more at http://seattleemergencyhubs.org.
Ola Oʻahu Resilience Strategy. (2019). See more at https://www.honolulu.gov/rep/site/ccsr/Ola_Oahu_Resilience_Strategy.pdf
Kretzmann J., & McKnight J. (1993). Building Communities from the Inside Out: A path toward finding and mobilising a community’s assets. Evanston, IL, USA: Institute for Policy Research
Baltimore Office of Sustainability. (n.d.) See more at https://www.baltimoresustainability.org/baltimore-resiliency-hub-program/.
