The RAFT process has three phases: an assessment conducted by The RAFT staff and external experts; an action checklist that identifies priority actions, which is developed collaboratively with community members; and one year of project implementation, led by the community and supported by The RAFT team. The approach to resilience process is holistic, emphasizing all three types of resiliency— social, economic, and environmental— and relies on quantitative and qualitative data and extensive community input. Details on each phase are outlined below.
The RAFT process starts by gathering information on a community’s particular vulnerabilities, as well as an inventory of what has been done already around resiliency. This holistic assessment includes a set of interviews and focus groups with community members (qualitative assessment) and using our unique RAFT scorecard to evaluate the resilience of the locality’s plans, zoning ordinances, and programs (quantitative scoring).
With the holistic assessment complete, The RAFT team shares its findings with the local government, which identifies its top resilience priorities. Later, The RAFT team gathers community members together at a workshop along with elected officials and staff from local government agencies, nonprofits, and businesses to identify the community’s top five priorities over the next year and align them with those selected by the local government.
Over the next year, The RAFT team members hold monthly implementation team meetings and help the community move forward on the list of prioritized resilience action items. Examples might be creating a green infrastructure plan, a plan for a community garden to address food insecurity, bolstering emergency communications pathways for evacuations, mapping shoreline erosion, or convening a committee to continue resilience efforts beyond The RAFT. Through their long-standing relationships and networks, The RAFT team connects the community with appropriate resources such as funding, expert faculty research, and state agency programs.
