By Sheila Murray It is near impossible to sum up our Lighthouse Project in the few short lines of an ‘elevator pitch.’ We could say that our pilot sites in Brampton, Toronto and Hamilton are working to create community resilience hubs or local resilience networks as a response to extreme weather events. But while most of us know what’s meant by extreme weather, how many have studied future climate projections and share our concerns about the increasing local extremes they will unleash? Once that’s understood, there are more questions: “What is community resilience?” for instance, or, “How is a resilience hub different from a resilience network?” And when we include the other essential pieces of our work, such as emergency preparedness, asset based community development (ABCD), the enormous potential offered by faith based organizations, or the power of bonded, linked and bridged social capital, it can all start to sound like jargon and dreaming. But in late August 2018, a faulty electrical box at 650 Parliament Street in Toronto sparked a fire that took out the entire electrical system. It sent black smoke pouring through the 23 storey apartment building and turned the lives of more than 1,500 people upside down. Suddenly all of that jargon found a personal aspect. There may be no direct link between the fire and climate change, but so much of our public and private infrastructure is inadequate to extreme rainfall, wind, ice storms and extended heatwaves. All of these create havoc that causes social disruption, power outs and displacement that affect people’s lives. The fire was in St. James Town, the Toronto pilot site of the Lighthouse Project. Local project animator, Lidia Ferriera had spent months working with residents using asset mapping and information sharing around individual and community emergency preparedness. Above all, she wanted to show the importance of building a strong social infrastructure that is motivated to work through the long process of planning a community response to, and recovery from, extreme weather impacts. That meeting and planning is what that builds local resilience. In the low-income communities where Lighthouse has been focused, it is also, crucially, about keeping the well-being of the most vulnerable neighbours central to the planning. ABCD methods encourage everyone to consider what they have to offer—including the vulnerable—and values all contributions. Every community has a diversity of strengths, expertise and aspirations. It’s not just about caring neighbours coming together in a local setting, it's also about the neighbours downtown at City Hall, such as Public Health, or the insurance executives and business leaders who can lend their expertise or leverage their influence to support the local planning. Emergency Managers can help design communications channels that benefit their work by enhancing the official response. They can also teach residents and other stakeholders how best to take care of themselves and each other in an emergency. This is the bonding, linking and bridging of personal and professional relationships that builds strong social infrastructure. Brampton’s pilot is led by animator Michelle Sullivan who is with the city’s Emergency Management Office. She is helping to create a multi faith network of faith buildings and volunteers, strategically located in Brampton’s vulnerable neighbourhoods, that will greatly increase the capacity of the EMO in culturally appropriate ways. Brampton’s vision was well articulated before this pilot began and has attracted lots of attention from municipalities such as Oakville, which has since launched its own faith resilience hub network initiative. We’ve reached the end of our exploratory pilot and we’ve learned a lot. In Hamilton’s Beasley neighbourhood, where Environment Hamilton’s Beatrice Ekoko is our animator, we realized that communities may already have what we could identify as resilience hubs. These are the places known to the neighbourhood where people are welcome to enter not only on a daily basis but certainly in times of crisis, and where they’ll find accurate information and guidance, some refreshment, washrooms and a place to charge their phones. For the most part they are the existing service agencies, organizations and institutions—faith based and otherwise—that serve the Beasley neighbourhood. For these organizations, the Lighthouse pilot (and its subsequent iterations), offers significant added value by delivering accurate knowledge of climate impacts and how they’ll affect daily operations as well as the vulnerable folk with whom they have good relationships. It’s that shared knowledge of hazards and risks, needs, assets and aspirations, along with a toolkit that shares the strengths and resources that the network provides, that builds community resilience. The resilience network supports the work of the hubs as they think ahead and plan for extreme weather events. It may also be a source of volunteers who, with the benefit of basic training, will be prepared to help out at the hubs in times of real need. Our SEED funding from the Ontario Trillium Foundation has ended. The pilot is over, but the real work has only just begun, and our wonderful partners, allies, collaborators and neighbours are moving forward with us. Future weather projections for Canada are truly alarming. Governments can’t do it alone. As they focus on updating and retrofitting infrastructure that was designed long before the true impacts of climate change were understood, it is up to us, neighbours, faith groups, businesses and many others to do our part in planning for an uncertain future.
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