Description

This partnership brings together faculty and leaders from community- and faith-based organizations to support community-led resilience efforts for equitable climate adaptation and mitigation across the U.S. Southeast.

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Led by GT faculty member Sofia Perez-Guzman (Civil & Environmental Engineering), the initiative is building an integrated resilience framework that centers:

  • Community-defined goals and priorities
  • Local infrastructure and legacy communities
  • Cultural traditions and social capital

Collaborations focus on:

  • Strengthening community-owned resilience hubs
  • Developing community-managed disaster risk reduction plans
  • Collaborating with partners in urban and coastal areas of Georgia and South Carolina

SCoRE/BBISS Lead

Jennifer Hirsch, Senior Director, SCoRE

Partnership History

This initiative began through SCoRE’s 2024 Faculty Fellows Program, when faculty from diverse disciplines voiced a shared interest in resilience-focused work. It gained momentum with a Sustainability Next grant that funded a retreat and community-academic pilot projects. Key activities included:

  • Hosted a regional retreat at the historic Penn Center on St. Helena Island, SC, bringing together faculty and partners from Georgia and South Carolina. Penn Center is the first school in the South for formerly enslaved West Africans
  • Launched six pilot projects advancing community-led resilience hubs in Atlanta, Savannah, and Sapelo Island, GA, and Penn Center, SC, and developing a community warning system in Brunswick, GA

Disciplines & Faculty

Resilience requires expertise across a spectrum of disciplines, including engineering, natural sciences, design, social sciences, and humanities, and faculty involved to date come from multiple colleges and schools as well as from other universities. Faculty leads are Sofia Pérez-Guzmán (civil and environmental engineering), Alex Robel (earth and atmospheric sciences), Danielle Willkens (architecture), and Allen Hyde (history and sociology) from Georgia Tech and Daniel Kilpatrick (environmental health sciences) from the University of South Carolina.

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Other Partners Involved

There are now over 70 people on our email list, many of whom attend our periodic check-in meetings, including faculty from Furman University and Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina; partners from the Center for Sustainable Communities, Penn Center, SC Dep’t of Environmental Services, Vicars Community Center, Urbana Perry Park Neighborhood Planning Assembly, City of Brunswick, Mystic Roots Foundation, Paradise Community Development Center, ReBuildATL Coalition, and Pin Point Betterment Association; and more. We are also engaged with the Southeast & Caribbean Disaster Resilience Partnership network.

Keywords

Resilience, community-led, infrastructure, culture, disaster risk reduction, emergency management

Associated SDGs

3 (Good Health & Wellbeing), 7 (Affordable & Clean Energy), 9 (Industry, Innovation & Infrastructure), 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), 13 (Climate Action)