Acting Together with the Community for Social Equity-Driven Infrastructure Resilience

The ARISE initiative utilized a list of prioritized strategies outlined in its strategic plan to develop action plans for implementation in collaboration with key community entities. Several community stakeholders collaborated to implement the ARISE milestones, including a significant inter-project community advocacy partnership with local health equity action teams (LHEATs) spread across various Kansas counties as part of another project called “Communities Organizing to Promote Equity” (COPE).

The ARISE/COPE LHEAT community advocacy collaborative leverages its solid local networks of residents and city leadership, governance, and authorities to provide opportunities for research team members to implement activities such as regularly meeting and dialoguing with community members at their coalition engagements. Community participants were incentivized with a stipend budget covering refreshments and their time spent engaging in ARISE community engagement plans and action implementation (such as surveys, focus groups, interviews, studios, policy advocacy, and so on).

This form of acting together with the community members draws upon existing networks and resources in the local community served by the ARISE project. Thus, collaborative community advocacy promotes a sense of community ownership that provides the foundation for preparing to respond to identified needs in community infrastructure resilience – securing resources, technical support, capacity building, action implementation, and mobilization.

 

Tools and Resources

 

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