Building collaborative capacity for regional resilience projects

Maricopa County is the 4th largest county in the United States, housing half of Arizona’s population of 4.5 million. The county’s cities and towns face challenges unique to arid communities, such as extreme heat, drought, food and energy insecurities, and more. Facing the impacts of a 25-year drought and higher than normal extremes in summer and nighttime temperatures, local cities have realized the need to collaborate on policies, programs and funding to ensure regional resilience to extremes.

As in most urban areas, there are many stakeholders, educational institutions/partners, organizations and local governments working on different topics and initiatives related to resilience. While this is helpful, there is an overall lack of coordination and long-term strategizing and planning. To overcome this issue, Reichman and the Sustainable Cities Network (SCN) conducted the Maricopa Regional Resilience/Cool Cities Workshops to facilitate a more cohesive regional approach and direction.

To organize and conduct the regional resilience workshops, SCN identified through its existing community partnerships those cities/towns and organizations currently working toward resilience and/or related projects. In an effort to leverage and align with related activities in the resilience space, SCN actively supported and participated in five early-on informational meetings called the Regional Infrastructure Exchange Series in the spring of 2022. Organized by the City of Tempe Office of Sustainability through a Vitalyst Foundation grant, the series provided necessary background knowledge on new federal funding programs and anticipated grants from the Biden Administration.

1. Through the assistance of KER Fellowship funding, SCN hired an ASU Graduate Service Assistant (GSA) to provide research and fall planning workshop support. Regional resilience research included:
3. Identifying and compiling a comprehensive list of key stakeholder organizations and projects/efforts working on regional resilience.
4. Creating a visualization graphic of these relationships and efforts indicating synergistic priorities, with the goal of identifying mutually beneficial resilience projects related to topics of extreme heat and green infrastructure.
5. Hosting several interactive workshops in the fall with key stakeholders to further build capacity and obtain feedback on important community needs relative to anticipated infrastructure funding.
6. Creating specific project profiles (including stakeholders, project descriptions, budget, outcomes/impacts, etc.) in anticipation of federal infrastructure grants/funding.
7. Synthesizing research and workshop findings into a final report with recommendations to fund regional resilience projects.
8. Solidifying SCN’s Federal Infrastructure Workgroup so as to continue community convening to further projects after the KER fellowship is over.

The Maricopa Regional Resilience/Cool Cities Workshops are critical to the long-term planning, and ultimately existence, of the Phoenix-Metro region. Without significant coordinated planning and investment in local and regional resilience, particularly related to extreme heat in underserved communities, the region will face economic and health hurdles and be less competitive for federal funding.

Workshop conversations proved impactful, resulting in:

• Bettered our understanding of a coordinated regional and equitable approach to community resilience.

• “Connected the dots” among stakeholders and initiatives.

• Built trust and capacity.

• Streamlined priorities.

• Identified opportunities and avoided duplication of efforts.

• Bolstered collaborations and coordination.

• Developed ideas furthering equitable governance and financing mechanisms to support coordination, design, implementation and payment for regional resilience investments over the next 20–30 years.