Do I need to hire an outside organization to help with monitoring? Who is responsible for monitoring implementation?
Monitoring implementation strategies takes additional time and budget; however, it is an essential step in resilience planning that cannot be skipped. The most cost-effective way to undergo monitoring efforts is to use data that are already being collected for other purposes. You don’t have to be an expert to gather monitoring data, and you can ask for assistance from community groups or other entities in order to share the responsibility. Be sure that you have identified the party responsible for monitoring, regardless of who it is or how the data are collected.
How do/will I know if a resilience strategy is effective?
A resilience strategy is considered effective if it is helping you move closer to achieving your resilience goals and creating a positive impact on your community. Identifying indicators of success as you customize and prioritize resilience strategies and then tracking those indicators will help determine if your resilience strategy is effective. While you can use many different criteria and metrics to determine the effectiveness of your strategy, it is critical to hear directly from your community members and stakeholders to ground-truth your evaluations.
How often should I update my plan(s)?
How frequently you update your plan depends on a lot of different factors and can happen in many different ways. Formal updates to your plan might happen every 5-10 years; however, throughout this process, you will continually learn new information, have to adjust to changing community conditions, and become more informed about your resilience work within your community. Informal updates to your planning process, implementation plan, and monitoring and evaluation plans can occur as often as necessary, and should at least be reviewed on an annual basis. Depending on the type of plan you are undertaking, you may be mandated by the local or state level requirement to conduct updates at defined intervals. For example, a climate-smart pre-disaster hazard mitigation plan is required to be updated every 5-years to ensure access to FEMA mitigation funding post-disaster.
High Five!
You have taken the steps on behalf of your community to proactively prepare for and adapt to changing conditions.
Let the CRO know if you would like to share your progress with the peer exchange.