With a comprehensive Community Resilience Hub program, resilience hubs can not only more comprehensively serve their communities during climate or energy disasters, but also better help their communities thrive on a day-to-day basis.
As you know, the definition of resilience hubs is that they are spaces where community members can access services for disaster response and recovery, as well as “to gather, organize, and access resilience-building social services on a daily basis.” So by their true definition, resilience hubs are holistic, they are community-led and community-driven.
Energy resilience through solar and storage are very much needed, but they alone cannot create a resilience hub. A resilience hub needs funding for programs that center building relationships and social cohesion (which are even more important in today's polarized world), and funding for food distribution and other programs, or nature-based solutions like community gardens and rain gardens.
Moreover, resilience hubs cannot exist as islands. We need funding to develop a coalition which could provide capacity building, communications portals and connections between the sites, governmental agencies and the nonprofits providing support for them.
We are at a make or break moment in history here, having just elected the most anti-environmental administration which could tear down safety nets and defund climate resilience programs. That means that resilience hubs will be even more urgently needed, as they replace some of the programs that our government had previously relied on.
As climate change worsens and with uncertainty in a new federal administration, there will be an increased need for localized energy services and investments in day-to-day resilience I have seen a great deal of excitement for resilience hubs over the years, but planning for them and their programming will not magically appear. It will take resources. Ava Community Energy, we know you have those resources, you have a $179 million dollar surplus. Put it to good use. Urge you to jumpstart this proposed coalition of resilience hubs, and funding for not just solar and storage but also for other programming needs, funding which should accessible to trusted smaller, less resourced Community-Based Organizations in frontline communities - in other words, an expansion of your successful mini-grants programs.
Let Ava Community Energy think outside the box a little bit. Fund what the community wants and needs.
Listen to the community and what we want, what we know is best for our community. We ask Ava Community Energy to invest in creative, holistic solutions to make sure communities can thrive.
Susan Silber
supporting resilience sites - hubs, spaces and neighborhoods - to evolve and flourish Project Director: www.collectiveresiliencenow.org
Calendly appointment link
11/21/24, 9:41 AM Ava Community Energy Mail - Ava - 11/20/24 - Susan Silber public comment https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ik=703fa6ea73&view=pt&search=all&permmsgid=msg-a:r7026461854767053229&simpl=msg-a:r702646185476705… 2/2