August 24, 2026
This blog draws on the Community Climate Resilience Workshop convened by the Climate Democracy Initiative with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Hosted at the Pocantico Center in Tarrytown, New York. From 14 to 16 July 2026, the Community Climate Resilience Workshop brought together more than 20 emergency managers, extension educators, disaster survivors, recovery directors, and community organizers to center the voices and experiences of small-town leaders from across the United States, ensuring that those closest to the impacts help shape the solutions.
Ask any disaster survivor when the real decisions get made, and many will tell you it is not before the storm. It is in the chaotic, disorienting aftermath when a narrow window opens for a community to rebuild and then closes as people want their children back in school, their neighbors back home, and a sense of normalcy to return. Efficient use of that window is rarely determined by the crisis itself. It is decided long before by who has the relationships, the information, and the standing to coordinate when it really counts.
To understand this reality better, the Climate Democracy Initiative hosted its first Community Climate Resilience (CCR) Workshop from July 14-16, 2026, at the Pocantico Center in New York. The event was supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and designed in partnership with a coalition of experts in small-town and rural climate resilience, community organizing, and emergency management. Structured as a working session, the convening put the people closest to the impacts in charge of the agenda to define what a replicable, community-led resilience model would actually require in the field. The recovery leaders who informed the workshop and convened on-site came from some of the country's toughest recent disasters. Among them are Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, the Eaton Fire, which spread into Altadena, California, F5 tornadoes in Oklahoma, flooding in Texas, and oil spills along the Gulf Coast. Their shared conclusion was an uncomfortable one. The systems built to manage emergencies, essential as they are, cannot by themselves produce community resilience, especially in small and rural communities.
Emergency management and hazard mitigation give communities something valuable: roles, protocols, funding streams, and a shared language. But they are largely built as "one size fits all" structures, geared toward identifiable hazards and declarable disasters. Climate change does not cooperate with that design. Alongside acute shocks, communities now face slower, compounding stresses such as extreme heat, drought, wildfire smoke, water scarcity, failing infrastructure, rising insurance costs, and strained local economies. These pressures do not always announce themselves as emergencies, yet steadily erode a community's capacity to cope. Fewer and fewer places move through a clean disaster cycle of before, during, and after. Many live in all three phases at once.
The difference in those moments of overlapping crises comes down to the community itself. As one CCR Workshop participant put it, weaving local values into planning helps “bring some organization to a messy situation—clear communication, roles, and priorities—so the community can focus on rebuilding, not fighting confusion.” The work, they added, is "about helping people in pain and helping the whole system get organized enough to move forward."
Historically, local capacity is one of the hardest things to fund and the easiest to defer. As severe storms and cumulative climate impacts continue, this is no longer tenable. The next generation of crisis readiness must prioritize localized democratic principles as a central part of resilience. Without civic capacity anchored in local knowledge and values, even well-designed programs miss the people who need them most.
Recovery is a governance question
It is tempting to treat recovery solely as a logistical enterprise focused on repairing infrastructure, reopening services, and moving aid out the door. In truth, recovery is where a community's future is rewritten. It determines not just what gets rebuilt, but who returns, who is priced out, and which hazards are mitigated for the next storm.
A culvert sized to yesterday's rainfall, a neighborhood rebuilt in the floodplain, and a family that never makes it back are considerations of trust, accountability, and inclusion — the substance of governance, surfacing at the moment it matters most. When decisions are made in conditions streamlined for expediency instead of inclusion, what happens in practice misses the mark. As one participant explained, “Effective recovery is equitable, meaning that the most vulnerable and least resourced communities are prioritized and resourced with recovery plans that will improve their resiliency in the future and align with their economic, health, and environmental sustainability goals.”
This is why the "before" matters so much to the “after.” Communities that enter a crisis with civic capacity already in place, trusted messengers, local leadership, working relationships across institutions, and a shared sense of local priorities are not simply calmer in the moment. They are better positioned to steer recovery toward repair rather than repetition, and to hold the process accountable when it starts to leave people out.
The capacity to build before the emergency
This is why support, both civic and financial, matters most during the "steady state" years, when no disaster is imminent. It was also where the CCR Workshop's testimony grew most specific. As one survey respondent put it, "Preparing communities to accept the fact-based urgency that extreme events will continue to occur and escalate requires a holistic understanding of the myriad paths to plan and prepare."
Across the surveys and discussions, the same three gaps surfaced again and again, the ones small and rural communities hit when they try to prepare in advance:
Access, training, and education. "Generally, assets and resources are not provided to implement plans, most of which are 'surface' interventions that do not investigate or consider the cause or context of the disaster," wrote one participant. People need to understand how emergency systems work, how to train and practice plans, and what actions to take well before sirens sound. That knowledge cannot be reserved for professionals. Local leaders, educators, faith communities, youth, and trusted messengers all need accessible tools and a shared language. The tools largely exist already. They are simply out of reach for the people who need them most.
Communication, awareness, and information sharing. "The need for effective communication, regarding both proactive outreach and timely, clear, and consistent emergency messaging, is critical," wrote a participant. "A more informed public will demand changes at the institutional level." Beyond immediate public safety, effective communications are essential for interagency coordination, continuous information sharing, and real-time analysis. Communities need channels that are accessible, consistent, locally trusted, and two-way, so residents can send conditions and local knowledge back to decision-makers rather than only receive alerts. When people know the process beforehand and see their needs reflected in it, trust takes hold before misinformation fills the vacuum.
Recovery, resources, and distribution. A central question for the workshop was "How do we empower small and rural communities to access resources or connect with each other to navigate the resources that are available?" Awareness of what support exists does not mean a community can actually reach it. Recovery funding rarely reaches communities equitably; often those hit hardest, including renters, small businesses, older adults, people with disabilities, and under-resourced neighborhoods, have the most difficulty navigating funding streams. CCR participants described how this plays out in their own towns, again and again. A democratic approach is not prescriptive; it’s inclusive. Community voices and values inform the process for a stronger recovery rather than a rebuild of yesterday's vulnerabilities.
None of this means every emergency decision belongs in a public meeting. In an acute crisis, speed and expertise do matter. But infusing participatory governance into readiness can address these gaps and create a more relevant process written “by the people, for the people.” The result is hopefully living documents that don’t sit on shelves gathering dust, but become evolving discussions and plans people actually use.
What this means for funders
For funders, the shift required is one of timing, not priorities. Climate disruption is placing fresh demands on the very things governance funders already care about: public trust, accountable institutions, equitable design, local leadership, and effective public investment. The catch is timing. Disaster money tends to arrive after the harm, yet what decides how a community fares is the relational, community-led groundwork laid well before. That groundwork is precisely what public systems struggle to fund, and precisely what philanthropy is uniquely positioned to support.
The practitioners at the workshop were consistent about what helps. For funders looking to serve small and rural communities, three commitments stand out.
Fund the assessment, not the ask. The most effective models begin with a publicly funded vulnerability and capacity assessment, not a request that communities endorse a plan they had no hand in shaping.
Invest in trusted local conveners. "If you've met one community, you've met one community," as one convener said. Because each place is distinct, a local organization understands better than any outside funder how to put money to work effectively, and it carries accurate information when official channels are overwhelmed.
Back train-the-trainer models. Participants agreed that the more small and rural communities connect with one another, the faster hard-won lessons get shared and applied.
What ties the three together is a single conviction. The notion that small and rural places know themselves best is a reality often overlooked by national, regional and even state models for preparing, responding and recovering. When funders act on it, putting knowledge and money in the same room, these communities gain what they most often lack: the room to act for themselves.
Natalie Montecino is Executive Director of the Climate Democracy Initiative, where she works at the intersection of environmental action and participatory democracy to elevate community voice and build more inclusive systems of local leadership.
Kara Lamb is Community Visioning Program Manager at the Climate Democracy Initiative, where she leads strategic engagement that helps communities shape equitable, resilient, and locally grounded climate futures that empower people and inform decision-making.
The Climate Democracy Initiative works at the intersection of climate and democracy, on the conviction that climate change is not only an environmental crisis but a governance one. Lasting solutions, we believe, depend on public trust, local leadership, and systems that include the people most affected. CDI helps communities reclaim decision-making power and build the civic muscle that long-term resilience requires.