Amy Purdy, an "adaptive" snowboarding champion and advocate for amputee empowerment via sports

smartplanet.com - by Reena Jana - October 18, 2012

CAMDEN, ME — On a chilly October day, a stone’s throw from a postcard-perfect New England harbor and across from an adorable town square, a group that included chief executives, grad students, physicians, public-school educators, activists, scientists, and artists gathered. Some members of this diverse crowd, assembled for the annual PopTech conference from October 17-20 at the Camden Opera House, were from large companies such as Nike, Google, and Procter & Gamble. Others were the twentysomething founders of start-ups that no one has ever heard of–yet. Or they were academics, investors, designers, engineers.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

rand.org

Community resilience, or the sustained ability of a community to withstand and recover from adversity has become a key policy issue at federal, state, and local levels, including in the National Health Security Strategy. Because resources are limited in the wake of an emergency, it is increasingly recognized that resilience is critical to a community's ability to reduce long recovery periods after an emergency. This report provides a roadmap for federal, state, and local leaders who are developing plans to enhance community resilience for health security threats and describes options for building community resilience in key areas. Based on findings from a literature review and a series of community and regional focus groups, the authors provide a definition of community resilience in the context of national health security and a set of eight levers and five core components for building resilience. They then describe suggested activities that communities are pursuing and may want to strengthen for community resilience, and they identify challenges to implementation.