Detect Gaps

Along the path to resilience, it’s important to actively seek out opportunities for improvement — from your processes to your engagement with community leaders. These steps can help you overcome obstacles, gauge your progress and ensure that your efforts are as successful as possible.

Process Evaluation

An ongoing understanding of the the outputs of your work and where you may need to make midcourse corrections are key to maintaining momentum. This step helps you keep track of the number and types of trainings conducted, attendance at trainings, and user satisfaction and staff perceptions. The ways you can gather this information include one-on-one interviews, satisfaction surveys, focus groups, and an accurate record of participants’ attendance.

Outcome Evaluation

Ultimately, everyone invested in your program is going to need to know how well it worked at achieving the intended results. Pre- and post-implementation surveys help you clearly measure outcomes against objectives to determine effectiveness and identify changes that may be needed going forward. Consulting with a program evaluator early in the process can also help ensure that these measures are in place right from the start, and that the information you gather is accurate and actionable.

Testing Resilience

Community resilience is comprised of several critical components, including community self sufficiency, education, organizational ties and engagement. Gauging improvement in each of these will help you determine the success of your overall plan. A table-top, simulated situation that analyzes capacities, detects gaps and identifies new procedures and training needs is an excellent method for testing overall resilience. Sessions should be conducted with key personnel and stakeholders early in your program and one year later.