Resilient by Design: How Communities Get Stronger

What Can We Do Together That We Can’t Do Alone?

It’s challenging to imagine how to be stronger when many are struggling. In times like this, I think of a relay instead of a race, where we carry and run when it’s our turn and look for each other when we need to pass the baton. Imagine not a team of four, but instead a community of many carrying, running, passing, and resting together. Our strength is made for the long haul, fueled by our shared purpose, and measured by progress we can see.

If resilience is something we build by design—not just something we hope for—then efficacy is what shows us whether we’re building in the right direction.

In our last post, we noted that resilience isn’t just about bouncing back. It’s about being organized, coordinated, and purpose-driven enough to recover, realign, and keep moving. And the starting point is efficacy. That’s what turns a group of collaborators into a system that can actually make change.

What It Takes To Move As One

What does making a difference really mean in a community context? Of course, there are lots of ways to support the people around us every day and act for the benefit of others and our immediate environment. We all have that capacity within us. But let’s zoom out a few layers and think about what it means to make a difference as a community - a larger, more inclusive collective of many people, organizations, and systems[1].

Given that context, we define efficacy as the ability of a network - or community - to coordinate, align, and drive outcomes that matter to a community. It’s not just about how many people or partners are in the room. It’s whether those partners know why they’re working together, trust each other enough to act quickly, and have shared ways to communicate, measure, and adapt as a community system.

We can measure how effective a community is at influencing outcomes. And we should.

Communities with lots of connections but no shared purpose often stay stuck. But those that build networks with clear roles, high-trust relationships, and real-time coordination are the ones that shift trajectories for all. Whether that means expanding access to care, closing equity gaps, or accelerating recovery after a crisis, the real work is in how we actually create change as a community.

What The Research Tells Us

There’s strong evidence across disciplines that efficacy as an indicator of community resilience makes a measurable difference in community outcomes. Here is the scaffold upon which we build out this idea:

Diverse, high-trust relationships across sectors and functions provide a foundation for sustained collective action[2].

Collective efficacy - the perception of mutual trust and willingness to help each other - is tied to community-level outcomes[3].
Cross-sector community collaboration, when designed intentionally, leads to better service integration, broader reach, and improved well-being[4].
Well-structured networks—with purposeful connections and distributed centrality—improve coordination, information flow, and results across community outcomes[5][6][7].

So basically, from this, we can imagine an efficacy formula: Relationships + Shared Beliefs + Collaborative Action + Structured for Purpose = Impact.

When you put it all together, we have a roadmap for strengthening how effective our community can be in driving change and impact. We can use data and statistical methods to test and quantify whether a community network predicts outcomes. That helps confirm whether our efforts work the way we intend, whether we are effectively making a difference as a community. We see this set of capacities as a key foundational building block of community resilience.

What Can Communities Do Now to Be More Effective

If efficacy is a designable feature of a community system, what makes it stronger? We now have the ingredients for our efficacy “formula”, let’s focus on a few strategies to make this happen. We’ll keep it high-level here but know that there are specific practices, techniques, and tactics that are the actual How-Tos of this work.

Encourage More, and More Diverse, Relationships. Connect across sectors, experiences, and communities. Effective networks rely on inclusive relationships and strong facilitation to build trust and enable collective impact. Listen more, mean what you say, give and receive freely.

Align Shared Goals and Metrics. Agree on what you're trying to achieve and how you'll know when you're getting there. Shared metrics keep everyone focused, adaptive, and aligned. Believe and trust that we can and will.

Facilitate Strategic Communication & Coordination. Build systems—tools, rituals, roles—for regular, boundary-spanning communication. These help surface challenges early and keep coordination alive. Act together, pass the baton.

Strengthen Central Nodes. Support key organizations or leaders that serve as coordination hubs. They connect across sectors, hold vision, and keep the system moving—especially in moments of disruption. Recognize the glue, the backbone, the responsible, and the reliable.

Why Efficacy Comes First

The goal is to have a resilient community system that delivers outcomes. Efficacy is the starting point. It’s what allows a community to align, respond, and truly make a difference on larger, systems-level outcomes. Without it, our other community resilience building blocks lack traction. Community adaptability stalls and sustainability fades. This is where it takes a village. This is where purpose and meaning must drive action. It’s how we’re going to make our biggest difference for each other and hold together when we’re being pulled apart.

Efficacy is how resilience takes root—and how it lasts.

So What’s Next?

We are building an additive theory of and framework for community resilience. The field and existing work done in this area is multi-disciplinary and diverse. We’re pulling together the best ideas and research to develop a testable set of hypotheses about the nature and composition of community resilience. We’re also translating these ideas into a set of actionable practices that can be done by anyone doing work in a community system. Translational research is where we live.

Next month, we’ll dig into the second of our community resilience building blocks: Adaptability. This is how communities can bend and flex their power without breaking. We’ll cover how strong systems reroute, reorganize, and reset under pressure instead of collapsing.

Until then, ponder this:

Are we rehearsing resilience, or just hoping for the best?

Here Are a Few of the Many Things We’re Reading (or Writing)

Garstka, T.A., Kennedy, M.B., & Bonnett, M. (2024, Fall). “Ecosystems Designed for Change: An Evaluation Framework for Innovators & Leaders.” Responsive Ecosystems for Change Series. Lawrence: University of Kansas. https://hdl.handle.net/1808/35612
Gillam, R., Counts, J., & Garstka, T. A. (2018). Collective impact facilitators: contextual and procedural factors that influence collaboration. In K. Bosworth (Ed.), Prevention Science in School Settings (2nd ed., pp. 71–90). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315112916-5
Cohen, D. A., Inagami, S., & Finch, B. (2008). The built environment and collective efficacy. Health & place, 14(2), 198-208. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2007.06.001
O’Mara-Eves, A., Brunton, G., McDaid, D., Oliver, S., Kavanagh, J., Jamal, F., ... & Thomas, J. (2013). Community engagement to reduce inequalities in health: A systematic review, meta-analysis and economic analysis. Public Health Research, 1(4). https://doi.org/10.3310/phr01040
Garstka, T. A. (2024, June). Modeling community resilience: Is network analysis the most effective method? Banff International Research Station Workshop on SocioEconomic Mathematical Epidemiology. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1suiJrkYmQfprtWWQujMfgZJ9b98HSPtE/view?usp=sharing
Daly, A.J., Finnigan, K.S. A bridge between worlds: understanding network structure to understand change strategy. Journal of Educational Change 11, 111–138 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-009-9102-5
Chetty, R., Jackson, M.O., Kuchler, T. et al. Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility. Nature 608, 108–121 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04996-4