The Los Angeles County Community Disaster Resilience Project - a community-level, public health initiative to build community disaster resilience.

Public health officials need evidence-based methods for improving community disaster resilience and strategies for measuring results. This methods paper describes how one public health department is addressing this problem. This paper provides a detailed description of the theoretical rationale, intervention design and novel evaluation of the Los Angeles County Community Disaster Resilience Project (LACCDR), a public health program for increasing community disaster resilience.

Building community disaster resilience: perspectives from a large urban county department of public health.

An emerging approach to public health emergency preparedness and response, community resilience encompasses individual preparedness as well as establishing a supportive social context in communities to withstand and recover from disasters. We examine why building community resilience has become a key component of national policy across multiple federal agencies and discuss the core principles embodied in community resilience theory-specifically, the focus on incorporating equity and social justice considerations in preparedness planning and response. We also examine the challenges of integrating community resilience with traditional public health practices and the importance of developing metrics for evaluation and strategic planning purposes.

Applying community engagement to disaster planning: developing the vision and design for the Los Angeles County Community Disaster Resilience initiative.

Community resilience (CR) is a priority for preparedness, but few models exist. A steering council used community-partnered participatory research to support workgroups in developing CR action plans and hosted forums for input to design a pilot demonstration of implementing CR versus enhanced individual preparedness toolkits. Qualitative data describe how stakeholders viewed CR, how toolkits were developed, and demonstration design evolution.