About us

Mission

Our goal is to enhance communities’ abilities to adapt and withstand disasters to be more resilient.

We are currently trying to do that by:

Identifying Barriers

Literature Review Brief

We've completed a literature review including nearly 60 articles which will be published here soon!

Please visit our website for regular updates

Scholarly Literature Review Publication

We've already done extensive work, but several questions still need to be answered. In particular, what are some concrete solutions to the issues we found, and future directions for research? We're continuing to explore these questions and search out additional sources that came up in our last review.

Our Own Study

Capturing community voice through group concept mapping

We're taking a bottom-up holistic approach using group concept mapping where we capture the knowledge of the experts by experience including individuals from the community AND the funders. This process involves three steps including:
1. Identify issues communities and individuals face when trying to recover from a disaster.
2. Group those issues into clusters.
3. Rate those issues on importance and feasibility to address.

Using groupwisdom software we can then compare and contrast the two different group responses and come to better understand what issues exist when it comes to communities recovering from a disaster. The results of our study will then inform our targeted curriculum development which will help address some of the vexing issues identified in our literature review and our own study driven by community voice.

Additional Research

Sorry nothing here yet, but please visit our website for regular updates about future research including an upcoming systematic review of the literature.

Developing Equitable Leadership

Grant Fellowship Details

Fellows will complete the following 4 main activities:

Receive Grant: Up to 8 grantees will receive $15,000-20,000 to enhance community resilience with a project of your choosing.

Participate in Study: Help us capture your knowledge as experts by experience in our study

Receive Training: One organizational representative will participate in our equitable disaster resilience-module training course.

- This training course will incorporate material from Tulane's globally recognized Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy curriculum and additional material will be drawn from various reputable sources to specifically address issues identified through the participatory research. These multidisciplinary and evidence-based modules will include the following disaster resilience and leadership topics:

1. 1. Human and Social Factors
  2. Economics
  3. Environment and Infrastructure
  4. Disaster Operations
  5. Measurement and Evaluation, and
  6. Research and Grant Writing

- The goal of these tailored training modules will be to increase equitable disaster resilience in communities, households and individuals. This will be done in a targeted way through the development of local leadership, who upon completing the course, will be better equipped to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters.

Grant Writing: Fellows will be aided in the creation of an additional grant proposal and in seeking out potential funders.
- Grantees will also each be aided in developing and seeking out potential funders for a grant proposal which will act as a culminating piece of the fellowship. Through this process fellows will enhance their familiarity with seeking out funding for their communities and preparing competitive grant proposals to increase equitable disaster resilience for all.

Developing Relationships

Strengthen Communities

CEDR seeks to foster community ties not only between itself and the community, but between community organizations creating a "resilience hub" where information and resources can be shared between organizations to increase the strength, breadth, and depth of social networks that can be utilized to better prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters.

Additionally, fellows will have a chance to build relationships with the Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy faculty, fellows, and partners who have a global reach and are respected as global experts in their fields.

Our History

The Walmart Foundation has invested in a group of 4 organizations helping local leaders and community-led organizations in the Gulf Coast prepare their communities for disasters. One of those organizations was CEDR which was founded in the wake of Hurricane Ida to address some of the significant issues that were laid bare by yet another major storm.

Learn about the other projects funded by the Walmart Foundation here including: St. Bernard Project, Institute for Diversity and Inclusion in Disaster Management, Nature Conservancy.