What is Community Resilience?

Our working group strives to help educate community members and spread awareness of the challenges heading our way and how we can respond appropriately. We also (actively) hope to enable and facilitate capacity building through a process of re-skilling at the individual, household, and community level. We’d love for more people to join us in this effort, because researchers have found that the most important thing that determines community resilience is social capital—the social network and web of connections amongst people locally that enable individuals and communities to achieve goals, access resources, and function effectively.

We’re also learning about the long term impact of climate change on different regions of the country. Using the American Resiliency channel on YouTube which gives forecasts and projected outlooks for every state in our country, we compared the PA and NJ assessments. The projections for NJ are much grimmer than for PA. Something our group recognized is that the videos focus narrowly on Climate. We’re committed to exploring what Community Resilience requires within the broader polycrisis and ecological predicament we face. 

We meet regularly once a month, every 3rd Tuesday at 6:30pm in Media, at a group member’s house. You can email Will Powers for the address if you’d like to attend.

If you’re considering joining us, here are some links we recommend checking out that have influenced the thinking of our group: 

RESOURCE LINKS

• The Great Simplification | Film on Energy, Environment, and Our Future | FULL MOVIE, 33 minutes long
• American Resiliency: Talking about Climate: Time to Change Tactics, 9 minutes long
• Resilience.org: Peak Oil for Gen Z: Seven Questions and Answers for a New Generation By Richard Heinberg, September 23, 2025
• Crazy Town podcast on the challenges of a renewable energy future