In October 2024, IBTS invited PR PASS Workshop to join its work team, providing expert counsel on participatory methodologies and community engagement throughout the development of Whole Community Resilience Plans (WCRPs). At the center of the opportunity was IBTS’ wish that, once drafted, the WCRPs would gain traction and lead to communities actively working to improve local resilience. PR PASS Workshop embraced the idea of “bringing plans to life” by designing participatory methods for three different meetings to advance project goals with community members and the team of professional planners provided by IBTS. This project serves ten communities across six municipalities and is expected to continue through May 2025.
The challenge before us was to build upon earlier communications and counteract the potential for diminishing participation over time. Though strengthening community social networks and investing in community capacity-building are important to disaster risk reduction, disaster research points to vulnerabilities that compound over time as recovery efforts fail to reach some communities. The growing distrust, strained networks, and exhaustion of leaders (Jerollman 2020) limit the response of community residents to events designed to mitigate risk (Gill 2007). Finding solutions to overcome this disaffection is an under-documented area of expertise that PR PASS Workshop was willing to address.
As we joined the team, IBTS had already introduced the idea of a journey on the “Resilience Train.” With this metaphor as a starting point, PR PASS Workshop saw an opportunity to blend immersive approaches to learning and gamification practices to create a safe space where local knowledge, community values, and histories could be considered alongside formal knowledge of emergency management, natural hazards, and government procedures. This interplay informed the assessment of risk and vulnerability while defining each community’s unique plan for greater resilience. The lighthearted approach of using a train journey to resilience did not make light of the subject matter; rather, it established a level playing field where formal and official data could be brought into “play” and analyzed by local actors who shared their assessments of the information exchanged.
At each closing event, PR PASS Workshop worked with a variety of stakeholders to help plan a transition in which the “train conductor keys” were handed over to a team of residents who accepted the task of using the roadmap to advance the resilience goals captured in each WCRP.