Our Programs

RCC’s three programs address urban challenges and build resilience at three scales, from regions to neighborhoods to local projects.

 Regional Resilience Partnerships

Problem Statement

Regions throughout the United States are tackling complex and compounding economic, social, and environmental challenges, exacerbated by the current COVID-19 pandemic. These include, for example, year after year increases in the quantity and intensity of hurricanes on the east coast and wildfires on the west coast. Low-income communities and communities of color experience the most severe impacts  resulting from these unprecedented climate events, particularly when coupled with longstanding affordability and equity challenges as well as the recent  health and economic crisis. 

States and local municipalities alike are calling for higher impact resilience projects cultivated through greater multi-sector collaboration among regional actors to meet this moment.  We need a comprehensive approach that incorporates collaboration across multiple sectors and at different scales.   

Responding to this need, RCC has developed Regional Resilience Partnerships: multi-sector efforts organized across a state or region to develop and advance high impact resilience projects that tackle urgent resilience challenges beyond the municipal scale. These partnerships support complementary and integrated policies and funding priorities from the local to the state levels, along with communities of practice focused on key regional resilience challenges.

RCC is laying the groundwork for this effort through two pilot programs in the greater Los Angeles and greater San Diego regions, supporting local NGO and government partners in project development through technical assistance, best practices sharing, and collaborative knowledge exchange. This work has yielded a portfolio of innovative resilience projects addressing stresses like housing affordability, racism, and economic inequality, along with mounting climate risks posed by wildfire and coastal erosion.

We call this “Resilience-Building Infrastructure”. It helps to strengthen community capacities and builds resilience to whatever the next challenge may be. While many private and development finance funds exist to help pay for these resilient infrastructure projects, there is a significant preparation gap between city needs and capacities and “bankable” projects. Many projects addressing urban resilience issues get stuck in the idea phase due to lack of access to capital. We are going to source such projects, make them capital ready, and activate them to become more resilient and bankable.

Having helped scores of cities develop multi-faceted capital projects through 100 Resilient Cities, the U.S. National Disaster Resilience Competition, and CityXChange, RCC has now established a project preparation facility. The RCC facility specializes in the design and organization of projects that maximize their contribution to building city resilience, supporting project champions in the areas of:

• Resilience design & project enabling environment technical assistance

• Pre-feasibility studies and project implementation plan preparation

• Introductions to finance entities

The facility sources projects from across the world in collaboration with international city networks and other project development organizations, focusing primarily on city- and district-scale projects. In addition to linking local efforts national and sub-national capacity-building initiatives, we also seek to organize sponsored, multi-city cohorts of project teams so that they can provide support and learn from each other.

The facility is sector agnostic. We believe that all capital projects can be entry points for building broad-based resilience, including the essential 'soft' social, institutional, and economic development dimensions of resilience.

Project Preparation

Problem Statement

The world’s cities need infrastructure. According to estimates they will need $100 trillion by 2050 (and $2.1 trillion by 2030 in the United States). Lack of capacity, timescale, political agendas and competing priorities of many stakeholders, make implementing critical infrastructures projects complicated and difficult. Cities need capacity to implement new kinds of infrastructures, which address problems in an integrated manner, because of compounding threats from climate change, pandemic recovery and social equity issues. 

Neighborhoods are where all of local government's siloed programs and funding streams intersect in the lives of residents - often through a similarly siloed network of community-based organizations. This approach has impeded innovation, collaboration and implementation of programs - that could help communities to build back better. 

To address their vulnerabilities and to foster more resilient city-wide condition, funding and support for the most vulnerable and impacted neighborhoods must be prioritized through a collaborative approach where all levels of governments, CBOs and private players work together towards a common goal of building a sustainable future for the current and future generations.

The RCC Resilient Neighborhoods Program:

• Partners with community-based organizations (CBOs) to build on existing community capital while infusing new resources and funding for resilient recovery programming and longer-term resilience management capacity-building. A primary resource provided by the program is the funding and training of a Neighborhood Resilience Fellow to champion local resilience initiatives.

• Leverages RCC’s deep knowledge of municipal government and its related contacts and credibility in city halls to help build stronger, standing partnerships between CBO coalitions and municipal government.

• Prioritizes key neighborhood-based programs, policies, and/or targets based on a collective resilience needs assessment

• Accelerates implementation of identified resilience priorities, including through engagement of RCC’s resilience design and project preparation capabilities

• Develops scalable and sustainable governance and financing models to support sustained capacity to reduce chronic neighborhood stresses and to reduce exposures and vulnerabilities to future shock events as well as gentrification and displacement pressures.

Resilient Neighborhoods

Problem Statement

The cascading negative impacts of crises such as COVID-19, natural catastrophes, and economic shocks are disproportionately borne by cities’ most vulnerable neighborhoods and by groups that are burdened by chronic racism, injustice, and inequity. 

In addition to the above program work, RCC also manages a steady portfolio of advisory engagements with governments, foundations, and corporations that draw upon RCC’s unique urban resilience expertise and RCC’s extensive portfolio of resilience assessment, planning, design, and project preparation tools. 

Within this portfolio, RCC customizes and facilitates participatory resilience planning processes to support local government preparation of Resilience Roadmaps and disaster recovery plans. These processes assess and prioritize risks and stresses, design and prioritize the initiatives, and held build the capacity needed to pursue them. 

Government and private sector clients also engage RCC to help them design their investments for greatest resilience impact, drawing upon RCC’s network of partners to provide the technical, finance, and project preparation expertise required to move from concept to implementation.