Line of Effort Six — Resilient Communities
Assessment Services
You do not need to become an expert to get started. FIR will assess your community’s critical infrastructure, score it across three resilience vectors, and deliver a complete planning suite — so your leadership can make informed decisions with real data, not assumptions.
Every assessed community becomes a building block in its state’s city–node portfolio — designed to stand on its own now, joined to its neighbors by written mutual-aid agreements rather than proximity, and built to merge into state and regional Black Sky plans as they mature. See the state planning approach →
Leading a city or county? The municipal front door — with the two-rung path from Quick Start to Diamond Blue — is at Assess Your Community. This page covers the full assessment service line, including contracted engagements.
The Fresh Start Assessment — Free
FIR’s Fresh Start Initiative provides a no-cost, no-obligation infrastructure resilience assessment for any U.S. community. A FIR assessor loads your community’s actual data from federal open-data sources — substations, water treatment plants, hospitals, pipelines, demographics — traces the dependency chains, scores your posture across all three vectors (Cyber, Physical, EMP/GMD), and delivers a complete document suite your leadership can act on immediately.
Cost: Free. No contract. No obligation. No sales pitch.
What Your Community Receives
The Fresh Start assessment produces a 12-document planning suite generated from your community’s actual infrastructure data — not generic templates.
Executive Summary
One-page briefing for elected officials and senior leadership. Three-vector score card with stockpile modifier. Top five priority actions. Designed to be read in five minutes and acted on at the next council meeting.
Threat Posture Assessment
Community-specific threat environment drawing from FIR’s published threat series, localized with demographic, geographic, and infrastructure data. What the Four-Party Ecosystem means for your specific community.
Infrastructure Dependency Map
Interactive map showing every substation, water plant, hospital, pipeline, and communications tower serving your community — with dependency chains traced. Which substation powers the water plant? Which pipeline feeds the hospital generator?
Three-Vector Scorecard
Independent maturity scores for Cyber, Physical, and EMP/GMD with a single days-of-supply modifier. Baseline assessment against the Diamond Blue target architecture. Your starting point on all three tracks.
Gap Analysis
Every item in the Diamond Blue checklist scored as achieved, partially achieved, or not achieved — across all three vectors. The delta between where you are and where you need to be.
Infrastructure Stack Analysis
Sector-by-sector assessment of your community’s 16 critical infrastructure sectors, organized by the infrastructure stack — tracing where cascade failures begin, which failure wave they arrive in, and how fast they propagate.
Phased Roadmap
Three parallel improvement tracks — one per vector — with phased actions from current state to Diamond Blue. Each phase includes responsible parties, evidence requirements, cost estimates, and phase gate criteria.
Funding & Financing Strategy
A federal-independent financing picture for each roadmap action: what the community can self-finance through anchor tenants, energy-savings mechanisms, and value capture — with grant programs mapped where they genuinely fit, as upside rather than foundation.
Training Plan
Who in your community needs which FIR training, in what sequence, on what timeline. Maps your workforce to the concentric ring progression: individual readiness first, then outward.
10-Slide Briefing Deck
Presentation ready for your council, board, or installation commander. Three-vector score, top priorities, cost estimates, financing options, and recommended next steps. Designed to secure the governance resolution that launches the program.
Project Management Guide
Implementation guidance for the working group: meeting cadence, milestone tracking, evidence collection, and phase gate reviews. How to run the program after the assessment is delivered.
Diamond Blue Checklist
FIR’s thorough, cross-referenced checklist spanning six self-sustaining domains — localized to your community. The target architecture that defines what “ready” looks like on all three vectors.
Rides with the Roadmap: Mutual-Aid & Standby Agreements
A Resilient Community holds its stack for its residents — and for the neighbors it has agreed in writing to help. The roadmap identifies the agreements to put on paper before the event: mutual-aid compacts with sister municipalities and the adjacent installation, standby and contingent contracts with local farms, fuel and treatment-chemical suppliers, and the priority-load terms for your keystone and anchor sites. Who has the water, who has the fuel, who has the clinic — settled now, so help after the event is a matter of record, not improvisation. Legal instruments are routed to your own counsel.
How It Works
Apply
Submit a request at fir.foundation. Tell us your community name and population. That is all we need to start.
Data Load
A FIR assessor loads your community’s infrastructure data from federal open-data sources. No access to your systems required.
Assessment
Your infrastructure is scored across three vectors. Dependency chains are traced. Gaps are identified. Documents are generated from your actual data.
Delivery
Your leadership receives the full 12-document suite and a briefing, and FIR coordinates the delivery schedule with your point of contact.
What This Is
A data-driven starting point. A planning tool that gives your leadership real infrastructure data, a scored baseline, identified gaps, a phased roadmap, and a financing strategy — everything needed to make an informed decision about whether and how to pursue resilience. It creates momentum. It gives your working group something concrete to work from on Day 1.
What This Is Not
A completed engineering assessment. Fresh Start documents are generated from federal open-source data and have not been field-verified. All entity-specific content — infrastructure details, threat assessments, population figures — must be independently verified by local operators. This is the beginning of a process, not the end of one.
What Comes Next
The Fresh Start documents are designed to create momentum. Once your leadership has reviewed the assessment, natural next steps include:
Training
Enroll your working group in BSE 099 — free, online. Your team gains shared threat language and a personal readiness foundation. This is the prerequisite for everything else.
Certification
Your lead assessor progresses through Community Resilience Coordinator (CRC), Certified Infrastructure Resilience Planner (CIRP), and ultimately Certified BSE Readiness Assessor (CBRA) — building permanent internal capability on all three vectors instead of perpetual consultant dependency. Officials who authorize and fund the program take the Community Resilience Leader (CRL) path instead: the Foundation and the governance series, no assessor coursework.
Contracted Engagement
For communities ready to accelerate, FIR provides contracted assessment services, exercise design, financing strategy support, project management, and ongoing advisory through the certification journey.
Contracted Assessment Services
Beyond the free Fresh Start assessment, FIR provides contracted services for communities and organizations that need deeper engagement:
Phase 1–3 Diamond Blue Assessment
Full three-vector assessment with field verification, stakeholder interviews, and validated scoring. Includes all 12 documents plus detailed sector reports. Delivered by CIRP or CBRA-certified assessors; a Diamond Blue scorecard carries a CBRA signature and is reviewed by the FIR Diamond Blue Certification Panel.
City-Base & City-Node Pair Assessment
For communities adjacent to military installations — and for towns paired with any key infrastructure node: refinery towns, port towns, chemical-plant communities. Joint assessment of civilian and node interdependencies, with coordinated resilience planning across the fence line. OLDCC-eligible for defense-adjacent communities.
Exercise Design & Facilitation
Tabletop, functional, and full-scale BSE exercises designed to your community’s specific threat posture and three-vector scores. Validates capability. Identifies gaps under realistic conditions — including the mutual-aid agreements, which are exercised, not assumed.
Financing Strategy Support
FIR helps communities fund the roadmap without depending on federal disaster money: anchor-tenant self-pay, power purchase agreements, energy-savings performance contracts, and value-capture instruments — with the grant programs that genuinely fit your actions mapped as upside, not foundation. For base-adjacent communities, the Defense Community Infrastructure Program pathway is worked in detail.
Courses and the free Fresh Start assessment are provided by the Foundation for Infrastructure Resilience, a 501(c)(3). Contracted consulting, live training, and paid engagements are delivered through FIR Services, LLC, the Foundation’s wholly owned subsidiary — its profits fund the Foundation’s public-good work.
Apply for a Free Assessment
No cost. No obligation. A FIR assessor will analyze your community’s critical infrastructure and deliver the complete 12-document planning suite. The only requirement is the decision to begin.
Request Assessment See the municipal path