Understand your community’s capacity and capabilities.
Now that you have identified and explored the hazards that have the potential to disrupt your community, you’ll be able to identify the skills, resources, capabilities, and other aspects of community recovery capacity your community may need to draw from in the event of a disaster. Knowing your capacity and capability needs will help you to understand how prepared you are for recovery. Moreover, by identifying capacity gaps you can place special emphasis on the most pressing capacity development needs in the weeks, months, or years you have before the next disaster strikes. What this looks like will be different for every community, and might involve such things as identifying and engaging with key stakeholders and partners, enabling staff training, purchasing equipment, technologies, and supplies, establishing financing mechanisms, and other capacity enhancements.
The general concept for a capacity assessment is to walk through a hypothetical recovery process, listing likely resource and activity needs and assigning actual community resources that exist to address them. FEMA’s National Preparedness System offers some guidance on how your community can frame the capacity assessment, using eight Core Capabilities, which include: Planning, Public Information and Warning, Operational Coordination, Economic Recovery, Health and Social Services, Housing, Infrastructure Systems, and Natural and Cultural Resources. For more information on capacity assessment, see the FEMA pre-disaster recovery planning guide (starting on page 43).
Another good way to structure a capacity assessment is to measure capacity against the five recovery areas used by the State of Colorado, which include: Community and Economic, Housing, Infrastructure, Health and Human Services, and Cultural and Natural Resources. These can be revised to fit the local context of your community. For more information go to the CRO Resource Center.
For support, use the Community Capacities tab in the Pre-disaster Planning Workbook and Pre-disaster Recovery Plan Template to create your own.