On January 18, 2012 we conducted our first discussion with a group of community members who completed their Household Resilience Assessments. Below are the results to date of the member assessments allowing some insight into our next step, resilience improvement planning:

Figure 1

Figure 1 above shows the medians (or center estimate) for each of the five areas evaluated on the resilience assessment: Community, Physical, Shelter/Safety, Transportation, and Economic supporting the 8 member assessments received to date. The score in each of these areas range from 1-Low to 5-High. A score of 3 suggests in general the evaluated group of 8 members meets the minimum requirement of being resilient in a particular area. Figure 1 shows the members were reasonably resilient in only one area, Transportation. All of the remaining four(4) areas are below minimum resilience level and will require some additional effort to improve. Remember, this an overall or summary scoring across all of the group members. Within each of the assessed areas above we may find some of the group members who have actually achieved reasonable resilience in a particular area, but we will not see this detail until we look closer at the individual member results.

Given the results of Figure 1 a reasonable question to ask would be, “where do each of us work to improve our resilience as a community?” A follow-up question might also include, “who in the group can I turn to for some guidance on improvement?” To answer these questions let’s look a little closer within each of the five(5) areas assessed:

Figure 2

In Figure 2 above we show a bar chart of family/individual member scores supporting the Community assessment. We note a typical individual score is just above 2.0 as we observed in Figure 1. However, there are two member families that score at or above 3.0. These members met or exceeded this area requirement for resilience. The two member families who achieved this level are R&J and S&C. The resilience working group members should look to these members to gain insight on how to improve their own individual scores.

In Figure 3 below we show a bar chart of family/individual member scores supporting the Physical assessment. In this chart we notice that none of the members scored above 3.0, which again is the minimum requirement for resilience in this and other areas. In fact, we observed this pattern of scores in the Safety/Shelter area as well. Given this pattern there is presently no one in the group able to provide guidance on improving our scores. We will need to search outside of the present group for answers on improving our individual scores in the Physical and Safety/Shelter areas of resilience.

Figure 3

In Figure 4 below, we observe reasonable levels of resilience for the Transportation area in all but one group, R&D. We should work together to understand R&D’s situation and help them to find some reasonable solutions for improving their resilience level in this area.

Figure 4

Figure 5

In Figure 5 above we observe below reasonable levels for many of the group members in the Economic assessment area. In fact, only one family scored well above an acceptable level of resilience, K&A. The Economic area was one were the group spent considerable discussion time attempting to understand the purpose and value. Many felt they should focus their time on the other areas and not worry too much about this particular area. As you can see, we are in the midst of a lively discussion here which has not been resolved to date. But, the discussion continues with hopes of resolution and direction in the near future. In the meantime, K&A seem to have some insight into achieving greater economic resilience and could possibly be used to help the group resolve their difficulties with this particular area.

In the last bar chart shown in Figure 6 we observe the trend of total resilience scores among the group members to date. These scores reflect the present state of the group before any planning or actions from the household resilience work has started. Figure 6 shows that all members of the group require work in one or more of the five areas evaluated earlier in this report. This work will require us to learn new skills, exchange ideas about resilience improvement, and acquire understanding from sources outside of the group to bring our individual household scores above an acceptable score of 115 as shown in Table 1.

Figure 6

Table 1 below shows the ranges established for achieving each level of resilience from the lowest at less than 93 points, to the highest level of resilience at greater than 142 points.

Table 1: Resilience Capability Ranges