Team Resilience

Throughout the process our team grew to have a new appreciation for the importance of resilience and collaboration.  We started by examining the work being done by the Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC): Resilient Vermont Project. They provided the foundation for what we came to know about resilience in Vermont. From learning about their multi-stakeholder dialogue process we asked the question: Who did they talk to and what were they doing? We expanded this initial question into an idea. Could we see how these multi-stakeholder dialogues affect Vermont? In particular, we were interested in what was happening on the scale of human interaction. Now we realize what we had been trying to imagine those first couple of weeks: what we were looking for was a map.

Our first order of business was to conduct a literature review of the theory of social resilience. We came away from this exercise with new vocabulary and a nuanced concept of resilience. We decided to gather information regarding resilience by taking advantage of the opportunity to learn from the other partner organizations involved in our seminar class. Formulating our survey was crucial in organizing our ideas as well as gathering information. We chose to keep the survey as short as possible in order to get as much information on connectivity as we could while minimizing the time required to take the survey. We chose to add two metrics, connection sector and strength, to deeper understand the implications of our asset map. Finally, we discovered Gephi, a new open source software that mapps connections.

 

From this foundation we created a map that showed connectivity in Vermont. One thing we were not expecting was how much this kind of data analysis was needed in Vermont. At the Vermont Energy & Climate Action Network annual conference we heard multiple people comment on the need to see who knew whom in the state. We quickly responded. Until that moment, we did not appreciate how powerful a tool this web could be, not just for its intended use, but also as inspiration. The connections the web shows is a beacon of hope that we can come together in the future to accomplish great things. The map is more than a tool; it is a statement proclaiming that we are Vermont Strong.