Activity 2: Revisit and Update Your Future Planning Needs

Purpose

In this activity, you will review the timeline for important updates to plans across the community and integrate information developed in this process into specific plan updates when needed.

Why?

Building resilience requires forward-thinking and long-term planning horizons. As you have already found, social and environmental conditions are always changing. These constant changes require attention and frequent iterations to your resilience planning.

When?

This process should be ongoing. A full analysis or assessment should align with full plan updates, as determined by the planning team or mandated by legislation or funding requirements. For example, Comprehensive Plans are generally updated every 5-10 years. This activity will likely take a few months to complete.

How does my community do this?

1. Review any new or updated documents or plans. Other local, regional, and state research and updates to plans will occur as you complete the implementation process. It is important that your team stays up to date on new information (policy implications, guidance documents, updated scientific information, etc.) as it becomes available. Another source for new or improved data is datasets or studies prepared in the aftermath of an event, such as a fire or flood. These resources often combine social conditions and context with bio-geophysical factors that contributed to the event and can contain useful information and lessons learned that can be applied to your resilience planning.
2. Assess changes within your community. It is important to ground truth your understanding of changes in your community with community input. This may be another important community engagement opportunity, or for another workshop with your implementation team, resilience strategy implementation partners, or other stakeholders. When assessing new information, important questions to consider include:
   • To what extent has there been a change in political leadership since the adoption of your plan?
   • Has there been a shift in public opinion that has led to a potential shift in priorities?
   • How have economic factors changed recently? Has this driven or constrained implementation (i.e. budgetary cuts, lack of third-party funding, etc.)?
   • Have there been societal shifts that might influence the ability of your community to implement or accept resilience strategies (i.e. increased unemployment, increase in violence and/or crime, decrease in interest in environmental issues, recent election or shift in political leadership, etc.)
3. Incorporate lessons learned from this process into future plan updates. As you know, resilience planning requires coordination between and among departments and levels of government. Earlier in this process (Step 4), you integrated your resilience strategies into multiple plans that affect your community. Many of these plans are led and implemented by different departments, agencies, and organizations, and it takes a lot of effort to coordinate across these entities. This is the time to make sure you are communicating what you have learned: including what has and has not worked; any new data and information; what you have changed-both in your short- and long-term planning; and how you see these updates being integrated across plans. Integrating this information into your regular policy and planning processes can be a useful mechanism to integrate resilience in your community on an ongoing basis.
4. Create a monitoring and evaluation plan for any new actions and strategies that are developed. As you adjust existing strategies and develop new ones, make sure you identify monitoring and evaluation processes to help you determine the success of those strategies. As monitoring processes from the initial strategies become less relevant, be ready to change how you invest in the community’s monitoring needs.
5. Update your plans(s) as necessary. When updating your plan(s), review new science, state-level guidance, and integrate any additional planning efforts happening across your community. See lists of potential data sources and information in Step 2. Also, keep an eye out for regional assessments emerging from universities and regional agencies or non-governmental entities that will be important to reference and include as you make updates.  
6. Persist through setbacks to reach your goals.