Team Resilience
Team Resilience
We are a team of five environmental studies majors at Middlebury College who studied the environmental future of Vermont. Recent climactic events, most notably Tropical Storm Irene, showed that communities in our state are vulnerable. During the course of our senior capstone seminar, "Imagining Vermont's Future," we discovered a great need for a tool that would illuminate resilient collaborations throughout Vermont. In response to this need, we created an asset map of connectivity to visualize collaborations between key people, organizations and sectors. The hope for our map is two-fold. First, we think it is an effective tool for identifying and celebrating specific resilience building collaborations. Second, we hope that the map itself can change how people think about resilience.
We are not the first to explore the concept of resilience in Vermont. For example, the Vermont Natural Resources Council recently developed a scorecard to measure resilience in the state. The Institute for Sustainable Communities' Resilient Vermont Project developed recommendations for creating a resilient future. What is clear from these and other examples is that resilience means different things to different people. Although there are so many interpretations for what resilience looks like, we decided to focus on one common thread that connects them all — the importance of collaboration between groups and people.
The Beginning
We began our semester with the Resilient Vermont Project in mind. The initiative, started by the Institute for Sustainable Communities, brought together many different people in Vermont to talk about resilience after Tropical Storm Irene. Through a series of multi-stakeholder meetings and focus groups, facilitated in part by the Consensus Building Institute, the community members involved came up with a collective definition for resilience. The definition highlights collaboration, interconnection and adaptability as being key components of resilience and building a resilient Vermont.
Through our research, we understand that resilience is a complicated topic. Yet, despite its many definitions, we found one common theme throughout our explorations — that collaboration is a significant factor in building resilience. We built off of this idea through the entire semester.
Finding Direction
We started collecting data by looking at the other organizations in Vermont who are also involved in the future visioning process. We centered our focus around five partner organizations, each of which has a unique partnership with other students in our class. They are: Vermont Energy and Climate Action Network, Vermont Interfaith Power and Light, Vermont Council on Rural Development, and the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources. In addition, one group explored the community's reaction to the Addison Rutland Natural Gas Project. Even within just these five groups there were a few names that were mentioned more than once. Our web of mapping connectiviy had begun!
Data Collection, Survey and Visualization
After exploring connections through the five other groups in our seminar, we began methodically expanding our reach. To do this we created an online survey that we sent out to all of the contacts of the other groups. We received 42 responses from this survey, which created 227 connections.
We then inputted this data into a free software program, Gephi, that helped us visualize the networks (as seen in the upper left).
This type of visualization is critical because it allows people to see degrees of separation, what projects are going on, who is working with who and what gaps need to be filled.