Thank you to those who participated in our CREATE Resilience: Building the Vision community forum on Tuesday, September 29! We had a fantastic presentation from Gary Szatkowski, retired meteorologist with the National Weather Service Philadelphia/Mt. Holly Weather Forecast Office, followed by an interesting community discussion about what resilience to natural hazards would look like in the Easton, Wilson, and Bangor school district areas. Participants discussed the following questions:
- What resources and assets in your community are contributing to resilience?
- What kind of mitigation strategies have you seen in your community that are working?
- What other mitigation and resiliency strategies and steps would be helpful? Think of ideas you have seen elsewhere or read about.
- Imagine your community in its ideal state of resilience as you envision it. What words describe that community? (some responses are shown in the word cloud below)
- What steps would be important for your community and its leaders to take to build resiliency?
Prior to the forum, participants completed a community mapping exercise and marked assets, hazard areas, emergency resources, and other elements of the places where they live that are important for resilience. Some of the results from this activity can be seen below.
The input gathered at the forum will help inform reports to leaders, community art murals, and educational materials for residents. We are developing a summary of community feedback and responses to the participatory mapping exercise, which will be shared on our CREATE Resilience webpage soon. Please stay tuned for updates on the CREATE project!