In just the last five years our community has experienced a global pandemic, a national inflation surge, a region-wide storm, and a local water crisis, together with political upheaval at the national, state, and local levels. Those stresses compounded existing issues, including housing unaffordability that was already at crisis level and deep-rooted inequities in economic opportunity, health, education, and justice access and involvement.
It seems clear that, going forward, we would be wise to expect a regular cadence of significant challenges that build on and exacerbate one another. And if we simply react to each crisis as it comes, we will inevitably find ourselves slipping further and further behind.
The alternative is to proactively build our communities' ability to respond with agility to ongoing and overlapping crises. Ideally, we want our response to the aftermath of Helene to leave our community in a better position to deal with the next challenge, which means both our crisis response and our normal investments should focus on building community resilience.
That’s hardly a new idea, of course. Building resilience has been part of our regional conversation for years now. But what has not been part of that conversation is how it requires us to change how we think about problems, investments, decisions, and how we track results and adjust what we do based on what we learn.
What is Resilience?
According to the Stockholm Resilience Centre, resilience is "the capacity of a system, be it an individual, a forest, a city or an economy, to deal with change and continue to develop.”
Notice how that differs from the way we usually use the term, namely, the ability to survive and recover from a disruptive event. The definition makes no mention of events or challenges or disruptions. It simply talks about change. And the goal when facing change is not to recover, but to evolve.
But why shouldn’t we just focus on recovery, particularly in the aftermath of a discrete event like Helene? There are two answers to that.
The first is that where we were wasn’t so great and so recovery to that just keeps existing problems and inequities in place. Crisis creates opportunities and to actively forego those opportunities is tantamount to explicitly choosing the inequity.
The second is that it’s a false choice. The devastation that Helene brought was clearly not just freaky bad luck - it was the result of shifts arising from climate change. We can’t talk about “bouncing back” to some normal state in a world where that option has expired. As much as we will undoubtedly resist acknowledging it, Helene was not just a devastating event, it was a signal that the world we are operating in has changed and will continue to change (for more on this, check out the interview with resilience expert Dr. Laura Lengnick in Links & Thoughts below).
Most of Our Problems Are Systems
The reason our world is changing is that, contrary to the way we have thought historically about the environment, it’s not external to our economy and activity. It and we are part of a deeply connected ecosystem, which means that everything we do changes the environment we’re in. What is special about climate is that the ecosystem it is part of is so big that we were able to do massive amounts of damage over many decades before it finally showed large-scale signs of ill health. Of course, that is also what will make dealing with it incredibly difficult.
But it’s not just climate change.
Every really challenging issue we face is similarly just one aspect of a larger system. Homelessness is primarily the result of unaffordable housing, with the minority of people who are chronically homeless impacted in addition by addiction and mental health issues. The unaffordability of housing in turn links to economic hardship, which is further implicated in a whole range of issues, including domestic violence, criminal activity, and food insecurity. Economic insecurity obviously depends on unemployment and wage levels, but can be (and is, locally) strongly impacted by medical debt arising from health issues and healthcare policy. Those interconnections just scratch the surface and it often seems like, in order to solve anything, you have to solve everything.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that it can work the other direction: improving one thing has the potential to positively impact many other things. More saliently, systematic small improvements to lots of things can potentially set up a virtuous rather than a vicious cycle, with resulting large improvements over time.
In other words, given that the problems arise from a system, we need to think about solutions in terms of systems as well. That is what building resilience is actually about: thinking about our community as an ecosystem and bringing to bear ecosystemic solutions that treat it that way.
What Are Ecosystemic Solutions?
That is way too big a question for a subsection of a short article. But we can say some important things about how ecosystemic solutions should operate.
An ecosystem paradigm, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica's Saving Earth site, is one that “emphasizes the structure and functioning of the unit as a whole and highlights the fundamental interdependence of the components within it.” That, together with the understanding that we are operating from within the ecosystem rather than outside it, gives rise to three key orientations an ecosystemic approach must have.
Holistic
This one should be obvious. If everything is interdependent and functions as a single system, then our tendency to chop the world up into discrete problems that can be solved by discrete entities undertaking discrete efforts is doomed to fail. Yet, for the most part, that’s exactly how we continue to structure our efforts and planning.
Instead we need to evaluate potential investments or courses of action and their impact within a framework that explicitly looks at how the issue at hand connects to other issues and, equally importantly, to other efforts. The goal is to break through the boundaries that we generally operate within, whether they be boundaries between issue areas, boundaries between different agencies and nonprofits, or boundaries between those who do the work and those who coordinate and fund it. We can still honor individual organizations’ priorities and constraints, but we must do it within a much broader context.
That obviously requires willingness on the part of system actors to collaborate. It also requires that we develop tools to identify and work with the ways different issues interconnect, as well as what efforts and collaborations around them currently exist.
I’m mildly optimistic on the first – that willingness to collaborate seems to have grown locally in the last few years in the nonprofit and government sectors. I will share stories in the next few issues about some of the collaborations I’ve been tracking through conversations with projects funded through ARPA, the American Rescue Plan Act (projects which, unsurprisingly, intersect significantly with Helene recovery efforts).
For the second, there is a wealth of data and other resources available and great organizations able to provide guidance in using them. But local efforts are needed to translate those resources to the local context, first, by creating and using the kind of person-centered indicator framework I’ve discussed before, and second, by mapping the local network of organizations, assets, and communities and the connections between them and integrate that information into our planning and evaluation processes.
Adaptive
The second orientation acknowledges that change is at the heart of an ecosystemic approach, for three reasons.
The first is the need for humility about our own understanding of the problem and how best to address it. Even if we know that an intervention is likely to help (a big if, given how easily particular contexts can affect outcomes), we may face collateral challenges like getting people to engage or to maintain participation – there’s almost always a learning process required before an intervention becomes effective.
The second is that social systems are not static - external events can easily shift what’s happening locally in significant ways. Negative examples leap to mind: pandemics and storms, policy changes that dramatically change funding availability (something happening right now as a result of the flurry of executive orders from the Trump administration). But there can equally well be positive changes - a recent one that has had enormous impact locally is Medicaid expansion. It’s important to be prepared to respond to changes, whether to adjust to negative impacts or to take advantage of positive ones.
Third and finally, there are changes that occur because an effort is having an impact. In an ecosystem, the very fact of intervention can change how a system works, often in highly unpredictable ways.
Between these three factors, it is highly likely that plans made at the beginning of an initiative will become increasingly inappropriate over time, so that adjustment will be required. This has critical implications for the way we plan and fund programs and hold them accountable. In particular, we need to design our approach to support, rather than thwart learning.
That certainly means that we must eschew the cheap (and largely ineffective) accountability approach that uses adherence to a budget as its primary tool, as I wrote here. That approach doesn’t just impede learning; it disallows it.
A better alternative is to think of programs as grounded in a set of hypotheses, which would encourage us to think explicitly about the underlying theory of change and how to test it. Indeed, data about how well the theory fits can be more important than data about the program’s impact, since the former tells us more about what we could improve. That is exactly the approach recommended in this stage-based learning guide recently put out by Innovations for Poverty Action.
SPARC Foundation’s program to offer EMDR and therapy to domestic violence offenders court-ordered to participate in their domestic violence intervention program offers a good example of this approach. The City of Asheville’s commitment of ARPA funds allowed them to experiment with incentive structures to learn how best to get people to participate, better positioning them to scale the program up for more comprehensive testing of effectiveness.
One important consequence of a focus on learning is that we need to think about initiatives as evolving over an extended period rather than as packaged “solutions” that we can simply turn on or off. That means thinking about how to sustain the effort so that critical learning can happen.
Sustained
This is the third orientation of an ecosystemic approach: an understanding that only sustained effort can lead to real change and transformation.
The previous section lays out the most important reason for this: the need to learn and adapt. A second reason is that fundamental systemic tendencies are themselves usually resistant to change, and show a remarkable ability to bounce back when a force for change is removed.
That’s why it is so common for systems to revert as soon as reform efforts are paused. The MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge is a good example. Although the initiative started earlier, the pandemic accelerated the very kind of policy changes it sought and produced significant declines in jail populations without negative impacts on public safety. Unfortunately, Challenge sites nationwide, including Buncombe County, have seen jail bookings gradually revert to pre-pandemic levels.
So even if an effort ticks the first two orientation boxes, if the effort is not sustained, it is unlikely that an ecosystem can be successfully transformed.
This has important consequences for planning and funding. As any nonprofit leader will tell you, one of their biggest challenges is trying to juggle the unending cycle of one-year grants compounded by the inevitable ebb and flow of political popularity. Government programs face similar challenges when their budgets are only decided year-to-year by political bodies that too often lack a framework for thinking strategically.
What is needed are strategic resources that provide multi-year funding that is unrestricted in the sense that funds can shift to match what is being learned or to deal with the challenges or opportunities of change. This arguably can increase accountability when paired with changes prompted by the other two orientations above.
Where From Here?
On January 7, 2025 the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced that WNC will receive over $1.6B in Community Development Block Grant funds for disaster recovery, with $225M of that going to the City of Asheville. That funding will obviously be supplemented significantly by other sources, both government and private.
In the end, though, the amount of aid will inevitably fall short of the toll that the storm exacted from our community. Even if we only want to restore the status before Helene, we will need to use those resources more effectively than our current practices are likely to achieve.
And if we want to go further and position ourselves to better meet the new challenges that will inevitably arise in our future, we must lean into a new approach. I’ve tried above to point to some of the changes that are needed. Over the next few issues I’ll explore some concrete stories about local community efforts that illustrate the power of an ecosystemic approach.
Links & Thoughts
Resilient Agriculture with Dr. Laura Lengnick, Part 1 and Part 2. This is an important and fascinating conversation with soil scientist and resilience expert Dr. Laura Lengnick, who headed Warren Wilson College’s sustainable agriculture program for over ten years and was a lead author of the 2013 United States Department of Agriculture’s report, Climate Change and Agriculture in the United States: Effects and Adaptation. For me one of the main takeaways was that truly resilient agriculture requires thinking beyond agriculture to the entire social-ecological system. The host, David Rayburn, is scheduling a follow-up post-Helene conversation. The Practicing Gospel podcast is focused on Christian voices of the left and on issues of interest to Christians on the left. These particular conversations do not get into any specifically Christian or religious topics.
“Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult.” In this fascinating essay, Nicholas Carr taps the ideas of Harold Innis to explore the ways that the characteristics of dominant media shape (and distort) our culture and civilization. Worth reading to the end since I think the final paragraph prompts interesting thoughts about how to counteract some of the worst impacts of our current media ecosystem.
“Systems challenges require systemic responses.” The Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation has produced a number of fantastic resources for thinking about investing in systems change, including this Design Foundations for Systems Capital presentation, from which I’ve clearly stolen some ideas. The Centre itself has shut down, but their work continues via the spinout The Good Shift.
If you want to share thoughts on anything I’ve said here or have ideas about further questions or topics you’d like me to explore, please feel free to reply to the newsletter email or contact me here.