School Organized Locally Assisted Community Emergency‐Management
| School Organized Locally Assisted Community Emergency‐Management | |
|---|---|
 Buckman School | |
| Team Organizations | Georgia Tech Portland State University OpenCommons Marcus Consulting Group WeAccel |
| Point of Contact | Jiri Skopek Ann Marcus Deborah Acosta Stan Curtis |
| Participating Municipalities | Portland OR |
| Sectors | Wellbeing Resilience Smart Buildings |
| Initiative | |
| Status | Concept only Stage |
| Last Updated | December 22, 2024 |
Summary
The School Organized Locally Assisted Community Emergency‐Management (SOLACE) project focused on the use of a community school as a community resilience hub for its surrounding community. Community Resilience Hubs (CRHs) can be defined as community‐serving facilities augmented to support residents and coordinate resource distribution of resources and services to the surrounding community. This project focused specifically on the use of a CRM to support community member needs before, during, or after a natural hazard event and on developing a community‐led sociotechnical infrastructure framework for adapting a public school (Buckman Elementary School) as the pilot CRH. In 2022, this project received a NSF Planning Grant.
As the most recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report describes, climate change and the growing frequency and severity of disasters could soon outpace humanityʹs capacity to adapt. Due to incommensurate infrastructure investment, social marginalization, and a reduced capacity to adapt, the severity of a disaster is amplified when it impacts a vulnerable community (e.g., people of color, immigrants and refugees, the elderly or disabled, and lower‐income populations). In coping with the disproportionate exposure of local disenfranchised communities to the increasing frequency and costs of disasters, strengthening vulnerable communities’ resilience and capacity to adapt has become a primary objective of emergency managers and community leaders. Following a Community Hub model, some community resilience efforts seek to decentralize disaster management initiatives to capitalize on communities’ social connections, trust, and community‐informed needs. Community hubs are typically vibrant centers of local social activity and infrastructure that use a trusted physical space, such as a community center, recreation facility, local business, library, neighborhood house, school, or a local community park, as a focal point of convergence. Community Resilience Hubs (CRHs), are “community‐serving facilities augmented to support residents and coordinate resource distribution and services before, during, or after a natural hazard event…they leverage established, trusted, and community‐managed facilities that are used year‐round for community‐building activities.” CRHs create an opportunity to serve communities at the nexus of community resilience, emergency management, and social equity while also empowering communities to be autonomous, socially connected, and sustainable before, during, and after disruptive events. Our current understanding of the sociotechnical infrastructure for CRHs is, however, limited: there are gaps between centralized emergency management and first responders’ use of the Incident Command System, emerging technological and communication capacities (e.g., digital twins), and fragmented community needs and resources (e.g., energy, mobility, and connectivity). We also lack evidence on how several local CRHs can connect to form a Community Resilience Network (CRN) to best leverage the sociotechnical infrastructures and serve communities across a larger geographic area during a disaster event. More crucially, we lack an in‐depth understanding of the ‘dynamic’ characteristics of disruptions and the emergency response needs that evolve during a multi‐hazard disaster event, which can be captured and addressed with a CRN. Notwithstanding the individual successes of CRH cases across the globe, we lack fundamental research on capacity, scalability, sustainability, transferability, and financial viability of such CRH networks.
This project focused on developing a community‐led sociotechnical infrastructure framework for adapting a public school (Buckman Elementary School) to become a Pilot School CRH. The overall objective is to establish and evaluate this new Pilot School CRH, to embed in a community‐led digital twin network of CRHs, and transform communities’ capacity towards disaster resilience by:
- promoting community knowledge (Information Hub),
- reshaping connectivity between local communities (Communication Hub), and
- building resilience capacity and access to resources & services (Service Hub) while integrating resilience workforce development and training to enhance preparedness and empower community‐led response to disaster events (wildfire, earthquake, and floods).
The 1921 Buckman Elementary School (Buckman for short, see Figure 1), located in the Buckman neighborhood community of southeast Portland, OR, is a publicly funded school district that educates children in Southeast School District (Portland School District 1j), Multnomah County and serves 448 students in grades K‐5. Enrollment by gender is Female 56%, Male 43%; and Minority enrollment is 32% of the student body (Black or African American 3.8%, American Indian/AK Native 0.5%, Asian or Asian/Pacific Islander 0.7%, Hispanic/Latino 13.7%, Multiple Race 13.7%, White 68%). Buckman was selected for this pilot project due to its various uniqueness including being an art magnet school embedded in a mixed‐use community neighborhood. Buckman is an example of a school in a highly diverse cultural community with the most diverse graduating class in its local geography.
During an initial planning phase the project team implemented a preliminary multi‐hazard disaster risk and vulnerability assessment of the Multnomah County, Portland, OR (Figure 2) and conducted three main community resilience workshops to engage and unify stakeholders, understand resilience needs of the community and disaster scenarios, and assess implications of using digital twin technology. The initial CRH model for the school was a plausible `physical place’ to serve as a focal point for the community to share their knowledge, needs, and experience; (2) receive support, safety, and access to services; and (3) learn skills towards building stronger community resilience. To serve as a CRH, the school would generally require a series of upgrades to ensure that the facility is able to provide critical services in three operating states of normal, the event of a disruption (wildfire, flooding, earthquake), as well as recovery. Buckman is undergoing current and planned resilience renovations to increase the facilities’ capacity towards serving as a CRH (see the FEOR document). A dedicated team of community volunteers (youth and young parents) would be educated about disaster preparedness and trained in disasterresponse and management skills to serve the community within the school CRH (the SOLACE Team). However, through the initial Stage 1 engagements with the school community, emergency managers, and stakeholders, the project team learned that although the `physical place’ model would build resilience capacity towards disaster management and response, there remains a gap between capacity and utilization, identified as the ``communication” gap. Many community and stakeholder members pointed out that it is not until the whole community is connected and can effectively communicate, that a School CRH would become a place to convene and be practically utilized. Part of the problem of communication is prevalence of numerous community groups involved and lack of coordination with emergency management authority resulting in difference in nomenclature and the lack of a common baseline. Preparing a community for disaster relies heavily on the school CRH’s ability to communicate with the surrounding community.
This includes hearing the community’s voice, connecting the community to the response teams and support services, offering advice and access to resources, and raising awareness. Closing the gap between local essential needs, resources, and services and advancing community resilience, is only accomplished through integration of theory into practice; A central depository and information dispatch platform, such as a `virtual place’ that could accompany the `physical place’ model of school CRH. This `virtual place’ would exist in parallel with the `physical place’ to capture and replicate the dynamics, while connecting the community to resources and to one another.
The emergence of ``digital twins” [1] , an endeavor to create intelligent adaptive machines by generating a parallel virtual version of the system along with the connectivity and analytical capabilities enabled by internet of things (IoT), constitutes the foundation for development of this `virtual place’ CRH infrastructure. In this project, we will investigate how to establish a community‐led CRH sociotechnical infrastructure that integrates evolving community needs, resources, and conditions to facilitate emergency response, broad and timely information‐sharing, resilient connectivity, and resource identification, location, and distribution across a digital twin network of schools as CRH in response to disaster events (wildfire, earthquake, and floods). This will be achieved through development and experimentation of a digital twin web‐based communication platform (Figure 3), capturing the impact (disaster developments and risks) of key emergencies such as earthquakes, wildfires (air quality effect), and flooding and the CRH services and accessibility to connect and enable the whole community (school community, emergency managers, and the SOLACE team) to interact pre‐, during, and post‐ disaster events. The project team will pilot a digital twin‐based sociotechnical infrastructure of a community‐led School CRH that integrates three key components of such CRH: (1) an Information Hub, (2) a Communication Hub, and (3) a Service Hub. It will then cultivate the capacities of School CRHs by establishing a CRN that is based on updated city management and community‐led strategies towards expanding CRH resource resilience capacity, distributed disaster response (across vulnerable communities and CRHs), and data‐driven decision‐making on disaster response. The pilot project will capture evolving community needs and resources to facilitate emergency response, communication, information sharing, and resource distribution and management in response to disaster events; through three primary goals:
- Goal 1. Establish and evaluate a pilot Community Resilience Information Hub
- Goal 2. Establish and evaluate a pilot Community Resilience Communication Hub
- Goal 3. Establish and evaluate a pilot Community Resilience Service Hub
Figure 4 illustrates schematically the team brought together to execute this proposed project. The proposal team members have a history of collaboration across disciplinary and institutional boundaries, technology domains, and community affiliations.
At the core of the figure, is the Core Civic‐Academic Partners team. The second layer is comprised of the Stakeholder Partners at the emergency management‐, school‐, community‐, and technology‐level stakeholders. The effort is led by a set of core team members that are part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)’s Global Community Technology Challenge (GCTC) SuperClusters (in particular, the Smart Buildings and Mobility SuperCluster). Wilfred Pinfold, Lead Civic Partner (Civic Partner) is an expert in leading industry, academic, government and community partnerships to deliver advanced technology solutions, who will lead the civic partners team and the civic partnerships and engagement activities taking place in the project site, Portland, OR; Jiri Skopek, Project Manager (Civic Partner), is Chair of the Smart Buildings GCTC SuperCluster and he specializes in community climate action through the 2030 Districts network and smart buildings and cities. He is a high‐performance building districts expert and will lead community engagement with district infrastructure including energy and how this infrastructure responds to stress. He is joined in this core team leadership effort by Stan Curtis, Civic Partnerships Lead (Civic Partner), an expert in introducing technology solutions to municipal governments and gaining community support; he will lead partnerships with Local & State governments, Emergency Managers and the School Administration; and Ann Marcus, Community Communications Lead (Civic Partner), a Global Communications Strategy expert will lead community and school communications with focus on whole community response. Deborah Acosta, Civic Engagement Lead (Civic Partner), is an expert in municipal technology deployment and public communications will lead public awareness and workforce development. Finally, Ken Montler, Technology Partner on Mobility (Civic Partner) is an expert in vehicle Automation, Electrification, Connectivity and Sharing (ACES), and will lead all aspects of mobility including vehicle connectivity, battery management, Vehicle‐to‐grid (V2G) and V2 Everything. They will lead the major civic partnerships and engagement activities in Table 1, described later in this proposal, which focuses on building the community network and understanding the community’s needs and vulnerabilities. The core team leadership includes Gregory Durgin, Co‐PI (Academic Partner) who specializes in digital twin networks and parallel intelligence and has expertise in wireless power transfer and harvesting, will lead digital twin platform development and network integrations listed in Table 2; and Neda Mohammadi, PI (Academic Partner), who will provide overall leadership to the project and who has completed numerous projects on social and infrastructure networks, disaster dynamics, and has conducted experiments with partner communities in the state of Georgia (GA) on infrastructure utilizing digital twins. She specializes in disaster decision makings with smart city digital twins, city infrastructure data analytics, human‐infrastructure interactions, and virtualization. She will provide overall direction and oversight of all project components, including the research and civic partnerships and engagement activities, and will lead the design and implementation of the digital twin platform and the associated data analyses, simulations, and virtualizations. The core team/academic‐civic partners are described in Table 1.
* EM: Emergency Management; URM: Underrepresented Minority; Georgia Tech (GT) School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE); School of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE); Portland State University (PSU); National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Global Community Technology Challenge (GCTC); Portland Public Schools (PPS); Portland Bureau of Emergency Management (PBEM); Regional Disaster Preparedness Organization (RDPO); National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Data & Reasoning Fabric (DRF); Portland General Electric (PGE); Schools Uniting Neighborhoods (SUN); Partnership for Inclusive Innovation (PIN); Partnership for Inclusive Innovation (PIN).
1 Research Questions Schools
Schools have emerged as promising candidates for CRHs as they already hold an important community role as trusted hubs for students, parents, educators and other community members. By further integrating a school with the sociotechnical infrastructure of the community through emerging technologies (digital twins, etc.), and critical resources and services (connectivity, energy, mobility) they could be better prepared to liaise with first responders and retain connectivity to a larger network of resilience hubs. In this NSF CIVIC‐FA project, we seek to explore the following overarching research question: RQ: How should communities close the gap between local essential needs, resources, and services to prepare for disaster events through a community‐led digital twin network of Community Resilience Hubs? To this end, the civic‐academic team will, cumulatively, address the following subset of research questions:
| RQ 1 – What Information on resilience is necessary to a CRH (and CRN) to capture and fulfill local essential community needs and challenges to prepare for disaster events (Wildfire, EQ, and floods)? |
| RQ 2 – How can local communities, provided with access to a Digital Twin CRH (and CRN), best Communicate information to prepare for disaster events (Wildfire, EQ, and floods)? |
| RQ 3 – What key local essential access to resources and Services (connectivity, electricity, and mobility) should be made available to local communities in a CRH (and CRN) to prepare for disaster events (Wildfire, EQ, and floods)? |
1.1 Project Goals
The Core Civic‐Academic Team will meet as a group on a SemiMonthly basis. This is critical in a collaborative community‐university partnership of this kind. We will share context, and discuss possible outcomes, to complete the project Tasks described in Table 2.
- Goal 1 Tasks (1.1‐1.5) Database Development: We will develop a Community (demographics, needs, access, and vulnerability), Disasters (Wildfire, Flooding, EQ), Neighborhood (GIS, hazard identification, service disruption, risk), integrated database. The civic partners will demonstrate and explain a School Mobile Unit, and implement Data Fusion, Transfer, & Privacy considerations (private Data store for information transfer with permission). Early in the program we intend to acquire a cutaway school bus and kit it out with batteries to provide power for phones and devices, a Starlink satellite link and servers to store information provided by the community until there is available bandwidth to upload that information to the digital twin. School buses are an integral part of many communities, and they are trusted by both parents and educators alike. The fact that school buses have been a fixture of American life for decades means that they have earned a level of trust and respect within communities that is hard to replicate with other forms of transportation. All of these factors combine to create a sense of confidence and security in parents and educators when it comes to school buses, making them a trusted and essential part of many communities. This level of trust will align well with our efforts to communicate the ways in which seeing such a vehicle in the midst of a disaster is bringing SOLACE.
- Goal 1 Task 1.6 Social Science Development: Community Resilience Survey(s). Goal 1 Task 1.7 Tech Development: Digital Twin Multiscale Dynamic Database (automated for continuous model training).
- Goal 1 Tasks 1.8 Workforce Development: Disaster Workforce (SOLACE Team). Goal 1 Tasks 1.9 Community Resilience Training: Disaster Scenario.
- Goal 1 Tasks 1.10 Community Data Partnership: Learning Sessions on Data Sharing & Privacy (Digital Wallet).
- Goal 2 Task (2.1‐2.4) Tech Development: Digital Twin Models (Development, Training, Analysis & Integration), Community Crowdsourcing Mobile Application (Figure 5), Digital Twin Visualizations (GIS + UI Design), and Integrated Digital Twin Communication Web Platform.
- Goal 2 Task 2.5 Social Science Development: Community Resilience In‐depth Interviews
- Goal 2 Task 2.6 Tech‐Social Development: Digital Twin Network of Community Resilience Hubs Sociotechnical Framework.
- Goal 2 Task (2.7‐2.9) Tech Deployment: Digital Twin Stakeholder‐informed Improvements. Digital Twin Platform + Community App Implementations
- Goal 2 Tasks 2.10 Workforce Development: Tech Workforce.
- Goal 2 Tasks 2.11 Community Resilience Training: ML/AI + Tech Use. Goal 2 Tasks 2.12 Community Data Partnership: Equipment Loans & Data Collection Training.
- Goal 3 Task 3.1 Resilience Capacity Building: School Mobile Unit demonstration Solar (Energy) + Starlink (Connectivity), and School Bus (Mobility/Energy). We plan to bring this vehicle to our quarterly steering committee partners meetings and take it to community events where we can engage members of the community and grow awareness of the program. At the completion of the research program the team plans to continue to use this vehicle to promote the benefits of considering resilience and implementing SOLACE at schools while they invest in the technologies needed to address carbon use.
- Goal 3 Task 3.2 Buckman Elementary School CRH Pilot demonstration Workshop: To demonstrate the operation of the digital twin we intend to set up a cloud server service to host the digital twin and an emergency response workstation to demonstrate what the model will look like and how it will be used. Assuming the size of the digital twin in <1TB.
- Goal 3 Task 3.3 Tech Deployment: Develop School CRH & CRN Best Practices. Goal 3 Tasks 3.5 Community Resilience Training: Whole Community Disaster Scenario, at which we will invite the entire community including the SOLACE Team and partners at PPS and PBEM.
- Goal 3 Tasks (3.6‐3.8) Partner Community Development: We will develop Blueprint content for Sustainability, Scalability, Transferability + Present out. These activities are described in the in section 7 of this proposal.
1.2 Intellectual Merit
The proposed NSF CIVIC‐PG project is driven by current and emerging need for more advanced sociotechnical infrastructure to enable and empower more resilient communities. The Intellectual Merit responds to NSF strategic research directions encouraging proposals in areas related to IoT and Cyberphysical systems. The concept of digital twins for cities―smart, IoT‐enabled, data‐rich virtual platforms of a city that can be used to replicate and simulate changes at the human‐infrastructure interface that can improve resilience, sustainability, and livability in the real city―has attracted substantial attention in academic, industry and government circles. However, there appears to be little consensus in these circles as to the best path forward for research and community engagement. Capitalizing on vast reserves of data and deploying data in a meaningful way that enables closing the gap between local essential needs, resources, and services and advances community resilience, is only accomplished through integration of theory into practice. This project will take critical steps forward for this transformative vision to be achieved. The intellectual merit of the project is reflected in its potential to achieve two primary goals: Goal 1 (Stage 1 PG): Understand the sociotechnical infrastructure of a community‐led Community Resilience Hub (CRH) by closing the loop and implementing a digital twin‐based framework for a Pilot School CRH that integrates evolving community needs and resources (Connectivity, Energy, Mobility) to facilitate emergency response, communication, information sharing, and resource distribution and management in response to disaster events (Wildfire, Earthquake, Floods); and Goal 2 (Stage 2 FA): Cultivate School CRHs by establishing a Community Resilience Network (CRN) that is based on updated city management and community‐led strategies towards expanding CRH resource resilience capacity, distributed disaster response (across vulnerable communities and CRHs), and data‐driven decision‐making on disaster response). The Stage 2 project will pilot a digital twin‐based sociotechnical infrastructure of a community‐led School CRH through three primary goals: establishing and evaluating a pilot Community Resilience: Information Hub (Goal 1), Communication Hub (Goal 2), and Service Hub (Goal 3). It will then cultivate the capacities of School CRHs by establishing a CRN that is based on updated city management and community‐led strategies towards expanding CRH resource resilience capacity, distributed disaster response (across vulnerable communities and CRHs), and data‐driven decision‐making on disaster response. The digital twin platform and framework developed in this project will be available for use by other communities.
2 Civic Partnerships and Engagement
The project team have established a layered integration of civic‐academic partnerships and CRH sociotechnical infrastructure elements (see Figure 4, and Table 1).
These engagements include Subject‐matter experts (SME) and stakeholders with (1) School SMEs: Portland Public Schools (PPS) Board, who is already engaged in a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) supported resilience initiative to convene stakeholders to help make Portland schools more resilient to extreme events, as well as the SUN Community Schools. The Buckman Elementary School is a member of the Schools Uniting Neighborhoods (SUN) Community Schools. SUN system service providers partner with over 50 local and community organizations to “Collaborate to create an efficient system of supports that provides equitable opportunities for every child and family to thrive.” SUN Community Schools was built on over 30 years of partnership between community partners, Portland Parks & Recreation, the City of Portland, and school districts. The City of Portland was a founding partner of SUN Community Schools in 1998; (2) Emergency Management SMEs: Portland Bureau of Emergency Management (PBEM), and the Regional Disaster Preparedness Organization (RDPO), and PPS Emergency Management at the school level; (3) Community SMEs: We All Rise, our primary SME and partner in community engagement with youth volunteers and community underrepresented groups (e.g., women, persons with disabilities, African Americans/Blacks, Hispanic Americans, American Indians, and persons from economically disadvantaged backgrounds). In addition, we have engaged representatives from the Buckman Community Neighborhood from the homelessness and urban camping community through Housing Alternatives Network; (4) Technology SMEs: Portland General Electric (PGE) as SME on Energy resilience, NASA and Smart Connections as SME in Connectivity resilience, and Urban. Systems on Mobility resilience, who will implement the School Mobile Unit demonstration; and (5) Stakeholders at Large: including local and state government and industry partners as Project Advisors (listed in Table 1). Understanding how community resilience and vulnerability indicators are distributed in a city will highlight areas where emergency managers should consider a stronger partnership with local community leaders and strengthen community cohesion, outreach strategies, and emergency operation plans. We anticipate to deepen our engagements with these stakeholders and, through the integrative, layered collaborative approach described in Figure 3, break down barriers between academia, civic organizations, and local and state governments. There is a great need for skill‐building and workforce development both on behalf of the community and volunteers. These skills can be explored in an immersive but safe virtual environment that the digital twin can create.
3 Broader Impacts
The proposed research and demonstration project will improve community self‐sufficiency reaching more community members in need while also establishing the value of developing a network of community resilience hubs in conjunction with community and city leaders and emergency managers. The research will result in a pilot CRH in Portland and will result in implementation, strategies and logic for development of a network of CRHs so the results can be replicated in other communities across the United States.
Academic Impact. The academic partners of this proposed project aim to disseminate the results of the Pilot at an interdisciplinary academic conference. Conference papers will be further developed into journal papers to enable the findings to reach a widerinterdisciplinary audience. The results will be disseminated in community workshops, academic conferences, and the research will train a postdoctoral scholar, and multiple graduate students. PI Mohammadi and Co‐PI Durgin have lead the 2022 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Digital Twins and Parallel Intelligence (DTPI), and will continue to incorporate and present research results of this project to the academic and industry participants of this conference. The research students will be exposed to the challenges and advantages of not only interdisciplinary research, but also multi‐domain collaboration of research and practice and will carry that knowledge and experience of translating research into practice first hand forward in their academic and career pursuits. Co‐PI Durgin has been a principal academic supporter of the Opportunity Research Scholars (ORS) Program at Georgia Tech during his 20 years at Georgia Tech, serving as faculty director of this program since 2016. ORS is an internship program focused on recruiting undergraduate students from under‐represented minority groups into embedded research projects. We will engage URM undergraduate interns through this program.
Community Impact. We have received a sound endorsement and expressions of interest from a wide range of community stakeholders during the NSF CIVIC‐PG project. The increasing effects and impacts of climate change, which are now felt almost daily, create tremendous demand forresilient infrastructure. Oregon with its combination of threats from earthquakes, wildfires, floods and heat events is a place, which will be particularly unified, included, and empowered by a community‐led initiative in increasing their preparedness to disasters, as schools are the heart of communities and a social cohesion and thereʹs an element of trust. We aim for Buckman to become a beacon of hope in the community, and a model for other communities to follow. The project team will establish intra‐ and interstate partnerships with Partner Communities to facilitate knowledge sharing, adoption, and transferability of the CRH pilot to other communities in the United States. This is in part facilitated by the state of Georgia’s Partnership for Inclusive Innovation (PIN), (see letter of Collaboration), for establishing such partnership between resembling communities in the two states (OR‐GA).
Global Impact. Through direct collaboration with the NIST GCTC group, this project has the opportunity to participate in NIST GCTC sponsored events, which bring together local governments, nonprofit organizations, academic institutions, technologists, social scientists, and corporations from around the world, who seek to develop smart cities and communities. These events include: (1) Global City Teams Challenge Expo: Usually co‐hosted by multiple U.S. federal agencies, the Expo is the largest U.S. Government‐hosted Smart City event for learning about smart city and community success stories and presenting findings of projects to leaders in industry, academia, and local, regional, and state government; (2) Global Tech Jam: Led by the Technology Association of Oregon, and recently held in Portland, Oregon in partnership with NIST, NTIA, Portland General Electric, ESRI, Google, Comcast Business, and Urban Systems, etc., The Global Tech Jam showcases potential technology solutions for cities and addresses key related issues (e.g., technology acquisition). Finally, this highly interdisciplinary and multi‐domain civic‐academic collaboration will enhance infrastructure for collaboration by establishing a research and pedagogical cooperation that crosses academic, community, government, and industry partnership boundaries.
4 Management Plan
Table 1, and Figure 3, indicate the affiliations and expertise, roles, and responsibilities of each member of the highly interdisciplinary project team. The project will be managed through three primary levels of engagement between civic and academic partners as described in Table 4 below. These partnerships will be managed through a series of (1) SemiMonthly Co‐ design workshop/meetings (Virtual) with Core Partners; (2) Monthly Participatory workshop/meetings (Hybrid) with Stakeholder Partners; and Quarterly workshop/events (In‐person/Hybrid) with Steering Committee Partners. The in‐person meeting with be led by the Core civic partner team in Portland, OR. The virtual components of these meetings as well as regular virtual project research progress meetings will be done through Zoom virtual meetings. This practice has been successfully accomplished during the NSF CIVIC‐PG project. The research team involves a postdoctoral scholar and graduate research assistants from different disciplinary backgrounds, who will be receiving experience in interdisciplinary collaboration in research and practice.
| (1) Core Partners: Active engagement in determining the needs, problems, and goals integrated with research questions, data collection, co‐design of and discover of the solution, implementation of the project, analysis of results, and dissemination of findings – Civic Partner leads (NIST GCTC) |
| (2) Stakeholder Partners: Participatory engagement in assisting with the implementation of the project, providing feedback on aspects of findings – Subject‐ matter experts (SME) and Subcontractors with defined set of responsibilities. They may contribute specific questions or ideas that address community priorities and provide incentives for community recruitment and participation. These include, but not limited to: (1) Buckman Elementary School: to conduct an intervention within the school, (2) We All Rise: to engage with potential community participants, (3) 211info.org: to learn about the characteristics of the community and the emergency response they hope to receive, (4) Urban.Systems: to implement the School Mobile Unit, and (5) NASA: to strategize effective data collection, fusion, and sharing. |
| (3) Steering Committee Partners: Supportive engagement – Steering Committee, and Survey Participants, Focus Group Interviewees. They help the project team understand how the research best fits in a community setting, conduct process evaluation of protocol delivery, provide feedback from participants, generate important information for subsequent resilient projects and investments, and be involved in the dissemination of findings. Steering Committee partners can participate in the interpretation of results after they have been analyzed, which can create opportunities to generate guidance on future directions, scalability, sustainability, and transferability of the project. |
5 Evaluation Plan
Our evaluation plan expands across the three project goals in form of an experimentation and evaluation of each CRH component: (1) Information Hub, (2) Communication Hub, and (3) Service Hub. In addition, we will periodically evaluate the effectiveness of our partnerships and make adjustments to our management plan to ensure the success of our interdisciplinary, multi‐domain, civic‐academic collaborations. We plan to gather evaluative data (process and outcome) both during the project timeline and at the conclusion of the project on the following metrics:
Process Evaluation. We will gather information about how successfully the project was implemented as it has been planned, as well as the impact of the project on the communities that are involved in the project through public participation in both data collection and analysis of the project, as well as workforce development, community resilience training, and community data partnership workshops. The project team will maintain a website, through which they will document and communicate the progress of the project accordingly.
Outcome Evaluation. We will measure the final outcomes of the project against the goals and criteria described above through multiple experiments, upon IRB approval. The metrics, data, and methods used for this evaluation are delineated in Table 5.
| Goal | Criteria | Metric | Data | Method |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NA | Effectiveness of Partnerships | Quality of Collaborations (Core, Stakeholder, Steering Committee) | Coded meetings, events, and workshop notes | Periodic Analyses |
| 1 | Dynamic Perceptions on Community Resilience | Quality of CRH Database | Text, Image, Geolocation, anonymized demographics etc. | Context Aware Quantitative Assessments |
| 1,2,3 | Community Impact | Workforce Development, Community Knowledge | Coded workshop notes | Periodic Analyses |
| 2 | Likelihood of Use | Technology Adoption | Crowdsourced Data, Survey results, Coded interview transcripts | Surveys, In‐depth Interviews |
| 2 | Successful Sociotechnical Integration | Connectivity (Social/Technological) | Data logs, Coded usability notes | Disaster Scenario Experiments |
| 3 | Utility of Emergency Access Points | Access to Essential Services (Mobile Unit) | Pop up surveys, Follow‐up Interviews | Descriptive Analysis |
| 1,2,3 | Scalability, Sustainability, and Transferability | Value to Partners | Coded workshop notes, Follow‐up Interviews | Descriptive Analysis |
6 Scalability, Sustainability, and Transferability
Our proposed plan for guiding Buckman Elementary School to become a community resilience hub is designed to be scalable, sustainable, and transferable to other schools and districts across the state of Oregon and the United States. Partner Community Developments: Primarily led by our project civic partners, our efforts towards ensuring scalability, sustainability, and transferability of successful outcomes in the 12‐month pilot project is guided by three Partner Community Development activities (previously described in the proposal): (1) Community resilience network (CRN), Multnomah County, OR; (2) Intra‐ (OR‐OR) & Interstate (OR‐GA); and (3) Sustainability, Scalability, Transferability.
During these events, the project team will perform outreach and share knowledge, processes, and outcomes, and execution plans of the project with other communities (likely with similar needs and goals) and stakeholders at large. The following strategies will be employed to ensure the scalability, sustainability, and transferability of our proposed plan:
Program Office: Following the completion of this program we plan to establish a Program Office to support local schools to pursue federal funds and implement the plan developed under this grant. The Program Office will provide plans for sustainable energy sources that can be islanded in an emergency, taking advantage of the batteries in the school buses and Vehicle‐to‐Grid (V2G) connections to operate 24x7. It will provide plans for broadband connectivity that is resilient to terrestrial disruptions and connects to buses as they bring connectivity and power to the community. The Program Office will also operate as the Open Source Program Office for the Digital Twin and Community Application software developed under this program.
Collaboration with Portland Public School District: We plan to collaborate with the Portland Public School District to ensure that our proposed plan is easily transferable to the other 100 schools in the district. We will work with the district to identify common challenges /opportunities that are relevant to all schools and adapt our plan to meet their unique needs.
Localization and Modification: We recognize that threats and challenges can vary significantly from one locality to another. To address this, we will localize and modify our principles and tools to address the appropriate threats in each school district. We will work with local stakeholders to identify the unique challenges and opportunities in each locality and adapt our plan accordingly.
Federal Grants: We will leverage federal grants available for schools to improve their sustainability and invest in solar panels, electric buses, and broadband. Our plan will provide guidance for schools to pursue these funds to not only improve their sustainability but also ensure they are resilient and able to address the increasing disruptions expected as our climate changes.
Continuous Learning: We will learn through each conversion of a school to a full resilience hub, making it easy for schools to quickly and reliably raise funds and deploy the technology. This will enable us to continuously improve the scalability, sustainability, and transferability of our proposed plan.
By employing these strategies, we believe our proposed plan can be scaled, sustained, and transferred to other schools and districts across the state of Oregon and the United States, helping to build a more resilient and sustainable future for our communities.