Empowering community resilience through a university-community knowledge exchange

The goal of this presentation is to introduce a Science to Solutions activity at Arizona State University (ASU). ASU’s new Knowledge Exchange for Resilience (KER) aims to build capacity both within the university and to broader civil society to address real, current issues of community resilience. We conceptualize community resilience in broad terms, that is: in terms of people responding to profound social, economic, and environmental change. This might come in the form of shocks (disasters, economic crashes) but more often we look at it in terms of long-term stresses, like from vulnerability to hazards, or chronic poverty. For this, we need better and more accessible data and, more importantly, a better models of working collaboratively. The collaborative model focuses on eliciting civil society throughout the scientific process from problem identification, acquisition and analysis of data, shared decision making over what is possible. In sum, we build upon the strengths of organizations to elicit new ideas and new solutions. I will showcase the collaborative model through a case study on heat resilience in the Phoenix metropolitan area.