Enhancing Community Preparedness and Belonging with Resilience Hubs

Why this investment?

Throughout the 20th century, discriminatory city policies and planning practices worked to marginalize and segregate Austin’s communities of color. This manifested in the Master Plan of 1928, which created a “negro district” in East Austin, also known as the Eastern Crescent, and moved all community services for Black and Latinx residents to that neighborhood or district. The Plan additionally pushed Black residents out from other neighborhoods by denying them utility hook-ups and access to schools and parks. Today, residents of color still predominantly live in East Austin, where they face displacement pressures, and, according to the City’s social vulnerability data analysis, are more exposed and sensitive to climate shocks and stressors such as heatwaves, floods, or grass fires.

Winter Storm Uri, which hit Texas in 2021, exposed Austin’s unequal vulnerabilities in water and energy systems along the lines of race and class, prompting the City to pass legislation to take action to become “a resilient community that can survive, adapt, and thrive in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, systemic inequities, or significant sources of stress.” To achieve this goal, Austin created six Resilience Hubs to support preparedness, recovery, and foster community resilience, especially among those most impacted by climate change: communities of color, lower-income households, the elderly or very young, people living with disabilities, and those experiencing homelessness.

What is this investment?

Developed by the Office of Resilience (OoR), Austin’s Resilience Hub Network is made up of community-based facilities that provide a variety of services and supports to residents before, during, and after emergencies. Each Hub is designed to support specific needs, enabling the network to provide a broader range of services. Some Hubs may focus on providing shelter for displaced individuals while others may distribute food and water or offer refuge from extreme heat or cold. The Hubs are not intended to replace emergency response and operations, but to complement them.

Through the Hubs, Austin seeks to build trust-based relationships between the community and City staff while supporting community preparedness efforts to face emergencies and climate-related crises. The aim is to expand programming to increase community resilience. “If you're struggling now and there’s a big event, and you bounce back to struggling, you're not resilient, you're just surviving,” Coudert says.

Establishing the network is a three phase process. During the initial phase, the City is working with the Austin Independent School District, Travis County, and community partners to launch six pilot Hubs in Austin’s Eastern Crescent community. The Hubs are located at the North Austin YMCA, as well as the Gus Garcia, Virginia Brown, Turner-Roberts, Montopolis, and Dove Springs recreation centers. 

The leadership team identified the six pilot locations based on an equity analysis, mapping of climate hazards and social vulnerability, and an assessment of facilities relating to their ability to offer various Resilience Hub services, including shelter or food distribution. Community discussions with East Austin residents and businesses about their needs and challenges related to disaster preparedness and recovery helped to identify specific goals and outcomes for the Resilience Hubs. 

These initial Hubs will serve as central points for communication, resource access, and coordination of aid organizations. They will also provide support for community members in areas such as housing, volunteer coordination, and information on assistance programs. Recognizing the central role that community-based organizations play in activating the Hubs, in September 2023, the City awarded $60,000 in mini-grants to 26 community-based organizations and businesses to prepare for, respond to, and recover from shocks and stresses. 

In the second phase, the City will identify additional Hubs to be activated in emergencies. The third phase involves creating a roadmap to allow the Hubs to be utilized for community resilience programs on a daily basis, rather than solely addressing emergencies. By 2025, the OoR hopes to grow the network to 30 Hubs.

Centering equity in the program

The city of Austin is committed to racial equity, and at the outset, the OoR adopted a set of Equity Guiding Principles—including centering community voices, acknowledging systems of inequity, and cultivating trust—to inform their design process. Coudert notes that, “Every single decision is run by the community.” About 250 community members participated in the effort’s community engagement process to map trusted facilities and identify neighborhood vulnerabilities.

The City has faced three main challenges to ensure the equitable implementation of the Hubs. The first one is related to procurement. Like most municipalities, Austin’s procurement system is geared towards larger institutions such as consulting firms. While designed to prevent corruption, this structure poses a hurdle in providing smaller amounts of funding, such as $1,000 or $2,000, to community organizers. Austin is actively seeking alternative methods, such as having committee members register as individual vendors or collaborating with institutions to navigate this challenge and ensure funds reach community organizers directly. 

The second challenge is related to the allocation of the ARPA funds. While $3 million was received, deciding how to use it effectively is difficult. Coudert explained that infrastructure upgrades are essential but expensive, and community engagement receives comparatively smaller amounts of funding. This underscores a systemic issue, especially in Texas, where the predominant focus is on spending funds on infrastructure rather than allocating resources for community-centric initiatives and engagement. Finally, it has been challenging to define what success means for both the community and the City, making it difficult to bridge the gap between the two. The City focuses on tangible outputs, while the community cares about improved health and overall quality of life.

Outcomes to date

Thus far, the City has completed electrical upgrades for backup power in all of the Hubs and has equipped them with supplies such as diapers, bottled water, protein bars, and sleeping bags. The OoR also released a Resilience Hub Toolkit, which serves as a user-friendly guide for community organizations looking to join the Resilience Hub Network. The toolkit outlines prerequisites, functions, and steps for integration, with flexibility for local customization.

One of the major achievements of this project is that the community now feels empowered to voice their opinions during the development of emergency response strategies. Moreover, the Resilience Hub has played a significant role in enhancing the relationship between communities and agencies such as the Emergency Operations Center. “It builds trust within Emergency Operations to talk to the community and have it work,” Coudert said. “The successes are more about relationship building than it is an actual output.”

Toward transformative change

The OoR is working to expand the base of support for the Hubs across City departments and to identify funding streams to support ongoing efforts after the ARPA funds have been spent. They are also working to seed resilience efforts within other agencies—for example, connecting community health workers to the Resilience Hubs. Ensuring City-owned facilities have backup power is a critical first step to creating the Hubs, and the City has allocated funding to equip additional facilities.