Stakeholder Insights about Progress and Next Steps for Taking Integrative Action to Build Resilient Systems
Report Publish Date: June 2021
This report shares recommendations from the 2020 Resilience Roundtable convened by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and RAND Corporation.
Based on the 2020 Resilience Roundtable discussion, an earlier roundtable in 2016, and input from RWJF’s Integrative Action for Resilience grantees, the authors recommend the following:
During the COVID-19 pandemic, RAND and RWJF brought together researchers and practitioners to build on the insights of a 2016 Resilience Roundtable and the experiences of RWJF’s Integrative Action for Resilience grantees. In this report, the authors wanted to describe how the integrative research agenda had evolved between the two roundtables, surface new recommendations and issues brought on by the pandemic, and pinpoint gaps in community resilience-building.
The 2020 roundtable included 40 leaders who research or practice integrative resilience. They met virtually for two days; the roundtable combined plenary discussions, expert panels, and breakout groups. For this report, the authors also used interviews conducted in small groups with RWJF’s Integrative Action for Resilience grantees six, 12, and 18 months into their projects. The authors compiled their findings into five recommendations.
“Although 2020’s multisystem shock was not the first for the United States, it provided an important opportunity to discuss what needs to be done to ensure that the nation can handle these stresses before challenges like this one emerge again.”
—Joie D. Acosta, Anita Chandra, and Jaime Madrigano, RAND Corporation
The report’s recommendations can help policymakers and practitioners build systems that are more resilient and more equitable.
The events of 2020 have provided a unique opportunity to take stock of U.S. resilience investments and learn more about the community conditions, system attributes, and leadership qualities that are needed to keep communities safe and healthy as the United States heads into an increasingly uncertain future. The 2016 Resilience Roundtable provided a broad set of recommendations to advance the field of integrative resilience by bringing together research and best practices to address chronic and acute stresses so that policymakers, practitioners, and researchers could take a more holistic approach to building safe, secure, and adaptive community systems. The 2016 recommendations also focused on initial steps for building more-resilient systems and a more agile workforce. To revisit these initial steps and to continue to advance and augment these initial recommendations, we gathered insights from participants in the 2020 Resilience Roundtable, grantees of RWJF’s Integrated Action for Resilience grant program, and the literature. These new recommendations focused specifically on building not just more-resilient but more-equitable systems and on supporting the development of agile and diverse resilience-oriented leaders with unique qualities and skills based on their age, career, and lived experiences.
RAND Corporation, June 2021
This study and report were conducted and created by the following people.
