by Brianna Crandall — November 25, 2016 — The International Code Council (ICC) recently announced the creation of the new Alliance for National and Community Resilience (ANCR).
ANCR officially launched at ICC’s 2016 Annual Conference in Kansas City, Missouri. Along with two founding partners, the Community and Regional Resilience Institute (CARRI) and the U.S. Resiliency Council (USRC), ICC is working with ANCR members from around the globe including Target Corporation, the International City/County Management Association, Kaiser Permanente, and the National Institute of Building Sciences to create the nation’s first Whole Community Resilience Benchmark.
ICC Board of Directors President M. Dwayne Garriss, who serves as the Georgia State Fire Marshal, stated:
With its diverse makeup and expertise, this alliance clearly understands that communities are complex, interconnected systems that urgently need a way to comprehend what it means to be resilient. ANCR will give communities a single, transparent, usable and easily understandable metric to gauge their cross-sector resilience efforts quickly.
A city with functioning electricity cannot effectively operate if the streets are impassable, points out ICC. A business that has survived hurricane winds cannot thrive if the banking networks have crashed. A household with running water cannot be sustained if the grocery store shelves are bare.
ICC Chief Executive Officer Dominic Sims, CBO, added:
For a community to be resilient, it must understand the resilience of each community function and how those functions respond to adverse events. Cities, businesses, and households need support to be able to effectively adapt to increasing environmental, health, economic, and social hazards, and their need to become more resilient could not be greater or more pervasive.
The launch already is generating a great deal of interest from both the private and public sectors, with Target affirming its commitment by donating $20,000 to the nascent organization on Day One, says ICC. ANCR plans to host two national workshops in 2017 to develop the benchmark and plans to pilot it in communities across the United States in 2018.
Visit the Alliance for National and Community Resilience site to learn more about the new initiative and to get involved.
