Resilient Communities Emergency Imagination Workshop
This hands-on workshop will explore the use of co-creative design methods for Community-Based Disaster Risk Reduction (CBDRR). The workshop may be of interest to organizations seeking innovative, low-cost, open-source, community-based approaches to emergency preparedness and disaster risk management. Participants will gain hands-on experience with the Resilient Communities Emergency Imagination Workshop (RCEIW). The RCEIW is an affordable, accessible, and bottom-up method of empowering and documenting community-led emergency planning. The approach relies on local resources and expertise to imagine innovative solutions to future emergencies—helping guide communities in the discovery of needed resources, information, processes, or collaborations that would help them develop a more resilient and effective plan for emergencies that are particular to their context. A recent UNDRR report indicates that current CBDRR approaches often fail to be truly inclusive and often fail to guide strategies. Several studies suggest that current CBDRM approaches suffer from: 1) unclear and selective participatory practices; 2) vague recommendations for applying local knowledge; 3) cursory use of CBDRR methods with little impact on DRR strategies; 4) lack of funding support for better implementation of CBDRR approaches; 5) a bias toward expert knowledge over local knowledge by DRR agencies. Additionally, many current table top exercises fail to focus on representative participant selection, require extensive training for use, or have inflexible scenario-based contexts that require unsustainable reliance on outside expertise to evolve for particular contexts. The RCEIW aims to address these issues. For the past year the RCEIW has been tested in two international settings and languages (Santiago, Chile and South Bend, Indiana). Participants will get hands-on-training, gain access to future workshop kits, and provide valuable expert insight into the continued evolution of RCEIW.
Organized by: Clinton Carlson & Rodrigo Ramirez
