National Resilience Guidance

National resilience is a complex topic and building it requires whole community effort. The National Resilience Guidance (NRG) offers a unifying vision of resilience. It provides the principals and steps all communities and organizations can take to increase their resilience in every sector and discipline. The NRG strives to help everyone understand and fulfill their critical roles related to increasing national resilience with the goal of increasing community and national resilience.

The National Resilience Guidance:

• Promotes a common understanding of resilience.
• Emphasizes the critical relationship between chronic community stressors and acute shocks.
• Addresses the resilience roles of individuals, organizations, and all levels of government.
• Provides an actionable approach to resilience planning and implementation.
• Incorporates a community resilience maturity model that walks through concrete steps to build resilience.

The National Resilience Guidance emphasizes that strengthening resilience requires a collective approach. A resilient nation is created and sustained through thriving communities with secure and adaptable social, economic, environmental, housing, infrastructure, and institutional systems. Addressing resilience from only one perspective or through only one resilience lens will not be successful.

“To become a resilient nation will require all of us to work together - let’s dig in and get to work.” Deanne Criswell, FEMA Administrator.

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With the complexity of this topic and the need to create a truly whole community effort to increase resilience, we committed to engaging with a broad range of partners to inform development of the NRG. Throughout the drafting of the NRG, we conducted over 80 meetings with federal and non-federal partners. We also held multiple listening sessions, in virtual engagements and at conferences, with over 1,000 participants from across the whole community -- representing numerous disciplines, sectors, levels of government, communities, and individuals.

Through these discussions, we gathered input on a range of topics, such as what actions and partnerships are needed to increase national resilience, the roles and responsibilities of the whole community, innovative approaches for successful resilience planning, and the resources needed to help the whole community understand and execute their roles.

We are excited to release the NRG and grateful for the opportunity to partner with and learn from the many people who shared their expertise and contributed to the development of this guidance. We will continue to engage the whole community as we develop additional resilience resources.

If you’d like to share your ideas about resilience topics to explore additional guidance, thoughts on resilience, or your resilience story and journey towards resilience, email us at national-resilience@fema.dhs.gov.