Resilient by Design: How Communities Sustain Their Power

What Does It Take to Keep Going?

Our local public library has an annual sale where community members can donate their bounty of books, reading enthusiasts (i.e., me) can fill their bag cheaply, volunteers of all ages staff the event, and the proceeds help fund programs that benefit all. It’s a little example of a sustainable circular book economy in our community.

So on a hot Kansas day, I picked up a copy of a still relevant book by one of my favorite authors, Rebecca Solnit. In A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, she gives us glimpses of what is possible when communities are connected, creative, and acting from solidarity rather than fear. A few key themes stood out to me as I read: Self-organization, generosity, improvisation, agency, and collective strength. That to me is what community resilience is all about and what I’m trying to deeply understand.

These questions circle and stack up in my mind:

How do we create the conditions that allow for the’ better angels of our nature’ to flourish?

How do we find sources of renewal and regeneration when our collective spirits waver?

What It Means to Sustain

Let’s look at sustainability in that context.

In our earlier posts, we explored collective efficacy—the ability of a network to act with purpose—and adaptability—the ability to reroute and reorganize under pressure. Sustainability is the building block that carries those strengths forward. It’s what allows communities to preserve momentum, deepen impact, and continue growing long after the immediate challenge has passed.

Sustainability is a community’s capacity to keep its core functions, relationships, and practices alive over time. That means stewarding resources so they can be replenished, investing in people and infrastructure so leadership and skills continue to grow, broadening ownership so strategies don’t depend on a few voices, and building in reflection so the system keeps learning and adapting as conditions change.

Sustainability ensures that recovery and adaptation are part of a larger trajectory toward lasting progress. It’s the circular economy of the long game.

Sustainability is the durability of resilience.

What The Research Tells Us

Across multiple fields, studies point to resilience as the capacity to endure challenges and seize opportunities all while continuing to build and renew. We can and should learn lessons from how that capacity shows up in contexts as diverse as environmental stewardship, food systems, and rural economic development. Research highlights five areas that matter for communities seeking to sustain their collective power:

Sharing and caring for resources. Communities that manage resources, money, people, and other supports fairly and keep them circulating are better able to stay strong over time [1–2].
Growing new leaders. When knowledge and responsibility are shared across generations, communities build continuity instead of gaps [3-4].
Making decisions together. Inclusive participation builds ownership and prevents burnout, giving strategies staying power [5-6].
Learning as you go. Communities that reflect, adjust, and share lessons at a sustainable pace are more likely to keep making progress, even when conditions shift [7].
Renewing from within. Systems that can self-organize —finding new ways forward without waiting for outside fixes—are the ones that regenerate capacity [8-9].

Taken together, we can characterize sustainability as continuous and intentional renewal in practice and in deed, giving communities the capacity to strengthen resilience over time.

Resilience endures if we choose to renew, again and again.

Weaving Sustainability Into Our Community Practices

If sustainability is something we can intentionally develop, how do we do it? Here are some simple, community-centered practices that line up with our last building block:

Share resources fairly. Pool funding, staff, and tools in ways that reflect community priorities and make everyone stronger. People closest to the work know where to find efficiencies and opportunities. Listen, try it, and move with generous intent.
Pass the baton. Support emerging leaders, share knowledge, and plan for smooth handoffs so no one carries the work alone. Make the time to prepare many for their next.
Decide together. Bring more voices into decisions, especially those often left out, so strategies reflect the whole community. Refresh ideas and agency with new eyes and new hearts.
Learn out loud. Make time to reflect while the work is happening as it is happening to adjust and improve together. Continuously learn and talk about it early and often.
Renew from within. Create routines and relationships that allow the community to reorganize and keep going, even when plans or partners change. Normalize pausing, resetting, and adjusting together as a habit.

Why Sustainability Matters Now

Efficacy helps us move with purpose. Adaptability keeps us moving under pressure. But sustainability is what ensures we’ll still be moving years down the line—stronger, wiser, and more connected than before.

It’s not about holding on to what we’ve built for its own sake. It’s about keeping the capacity alive to create change, again and again. That’s the long game of resilience.

Pulling It All Together

Over the last few months, we’ve introduced three building blocks of resilience, a sample of research supporting each, and some ways to act, practice, and strengthen our community work. There are likely other components and nuances we have missed, but we’ve landed on these three core concepts:

Efficacy: the ability to act together with alignment, purpose, and impact.
Adaptability: the ability to reroute and reorganize when conditions shift.
Sustainability: the ability to keep progress alive for the long haul.

These building blocks don’t stand alone. They reinforce one another—efficacy makes adaptation possible, adaptability strengthens sustainability, and sustainability ensures the other two matter beyond the moment. Taken together, they give us a way to design resilience into our communities, to build the will and the way towards what we know is possible. We owe it to our fellow humans to be and do better as we rise to meet the challenges we face now and those ahead of us. We can sustain our collective power for good, and we should.

“Most people are altruistic, resilient, resourceful, and creative when it matters most.” [10]

*TAG at Painted Rock Shoreline, Lake Superior*

What Comes Next

A natural next step is to assess where we are and move from ideas to insight. If these building blocks really matter, we need a way to see where communities are strong, where they’re vulnerable, and where to focus attention.

That’s why we’ve developed a 12-item Resilience Check-Up Tool—a simple way to assess efficacy, adaptability, and sustainability in practice for communities, ecosystems, and networks. If you are leading or involved in an initiative to drive change with many people and organizations at the table, this is for you.

In our next release, we’ll share the scale and show how communities and networks can use it to take stock of their current capacity, identify strengths, and track progress over time. We’ll provide opportunities to participate in validating this tool, to be a part of a community of practice, or to test strategies, innovations, and new ideas. Together.

This is our contribution to the rich and evolving work of practical resilience-building. The root causes of instability and disruption that requires resilience are many and complex; so too must the solutions. Until then, I’m working on these questions:

What can we actually do together?

What changes within our reach can we make now?

What is possible if we try?

Here Are a Few of the Many Things We’re Reading

McMillen, H., Campbell, L. K., Svendsen, E. S., & Reynolds, R. (2016). Recognizing stewardship practices as indicators of social resilience: In living memorials and in a community garden. Sustainability, 8(8), 775. https://doi.org/10.3390/su8080775
Landau, L. F., Campbell, L. K., Svendsen, E. S., & Johnson, M. L. (2021). Building adaptive capacity through civic environmental stewardship: Responding to COVID-19 alongside compounding and concurrent crises. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, 3, 705178. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2021.705178
Anane-Simon, R., Boateng, R., & Effah, J. (2023). Inclusive leadership for sustainable development in times of change. Routledge Open Research, 2, 22. https://doi.org/10.12688/routledgeopenres.17820.2
Paunovic, I., Müller, C., & Deimel, K. (2023). Citizen participation for sustainability and resilience: A generational cohort perspective on community brand identity perceptions and development priorities in a rural community. Sustainability, 15(15), 7307. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15097307
Dushkova, D., & Ivlieva, O. (2024). Empowering communities to act for a change: A review of community empowerment programs toward sustainability and resilience. Sustainability, 16(18), 8700. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16198700
Wyborn, C. (2015). Co-productive governance: a relational framework for adaptive governance. Global Environmental Change, 30, 56-67.
McNamara, K. E., Westoby, R., & Clissold, R. (2022). Lessons for adaptation pathways in the Pacific Islands. PloS Climate, 1(2), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000011
Erwin, A., Arnaiz, K., & Lutz, B. (2023). Self-organization for community resilience in an invisible agricultural community. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 7, 1160109. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2023.1160109
Glor, E. (2007). Assessing Organizational Capacity to Adapt. Emergence: Complexity and Organization, 9, 33.
Solnit, R. (2009). A paradise built in hell: The extraordinary communities that arise in disaster. New York, NY: Viking.