LINE OF EFFORT FOUR — RESILIENT COMMUNITIES
Most towns are ready for 72 hours. We help you be ready for 30 to 60 days.
You don’t have to harden every wire and pipe to be resilient — that would break any municipal budget. There is a sensible middle path: know your dependencies, fix your worst single points of failure, and build a continuity capability that carries your community through the weeks that matter. And there’s a further opportunity most communities miss: reliable power has become the number-one asset employers look for in a location — so the same work that protects your community can also grow it. Readiness and economic development, one purchase, not two.
The assessment is free — always. Requesting it needs no appropriation and commits your community to nothing.
Between doing nothing and hardening everything
Communities tend to see two options, and freeze. There is a third, and it’s the one that actually gets funded and built.
Do nothing
Hope the event doesn’t come. Free today — ruinously expensive on Day 4, when there is no plan and no supply.
A sensible 30–60 day capability
Target the dependencies and failure points that actually decide whether your community functions — water, power, food, communications, coordination. Fund what matters first.
Harden everything
Full systemic hardening of all infrastructure. Technically ideal, financially impossible for almost any municipality. The plan that never leaves the binder.
Resilience that doesn’t break the bank is the kind that gets built. We help you find the smallest set of investments that buys the biggest jump in days-of-supply.
You choose the pace. Neither step requires the other.
The assessment sizes both of these for your community — a modest first step your budget can carry, and a larger path where resilience pays for itself.
Quick Start — 30 days of continuity for your key staff
A solved problem, not a partial measure: thirty days of supplies, assured power and water, and working equipment for the people who keep water flowing, power restored, and 911 answered — using facilities your community already owns. That can mean equipping part of the municipal center, extending your existing emergency offices, adding the capability to a high school that already has locker rooms and a cafeteria, or converting a warehouse.
A normal budget-cycle line itemA Diamond Blue district — where resilience pays for itself
A development site where an anchor tenant’s need for reliable power finances the deeper resilience. Your community’s commitment can be as light as helping identify a commercial or industrial site and cooperating on zoning and permits. Locating a municipal building inside the park, contributing land through an economic-development grant, or deeper participation are options — never conditions.
Can begin with no municipal dollarsAn extension of what you already do for a three-day storm — carried to thirty. The second step is simply there when your community wants it.
Five steps. No surprises. Exit at every one.
Built entirely from your community’s actual infrastructure data — not a generic template — and everything we deliver is yours to keep, whatever you decide.
You submit the request
That’s the whole commitment. No cost, no appropriation, no obligation.
We run the assessment
A free, data-driven analysis of your dependencies, single points of failure, and days-of-supply across each lifeline.
You receive the results
A package built for your process — findings, a costed Quick Start comparison, and a council-ready decision brief.
Your council receives it
With a recommended motion that appropriates nothing: receive the findings and let staff evaluate them.
You decide
Fund a Quick Start, train your team, explore a district — or stop. Every deliverable stays yours regardless.
A document suite built from your data
Concrete, fundable, and yours to act on — with no sales pitch attached.
Your team’s first training level is included — free.
Every delivered assessment includes the Free Foundational Level for your whole team — Member Orientation plus the full foundational course set (BSE 099–102) — at no cost. From there, a certification pathway carries designated staff from Certified Resilience Coordinator to certified practitioner, so the capability lives inside your own organization and lasts.
The assessment is free. The first step is yours.
FIR conducts community resilience assessments at no cost — funded by the Foundation’s endowment model, not by selling you anything. No upsell, no obligation. Just an honest picture of where your community stands and what it would take to stand on its own. And when your staff wants a second opinion, we’ll connect them directly with municipal officials already walking this path — ask them, not us.
Your community depends on infrastructure it doesn’t control.
Let’s map that dependency together — calmly, affordably, and on your timeline. The first step is free, and every step after it is your call.