Community Studios
While Kansas residents rarely get to talk to academics about real-world challenges, the ARISE project uses community studios to facilitate these types of conversations.
From February to June 2024, the team hosted eight community studios, including two in Spanish, in five cities. Roughly 85 Kansans from Dodge City, Garden City, Liberal, Kansas City, and Overland Park attended these events alongside 20 in-state scientists.
Attendees shared stories about disaster resilience and infrastructure investments in their communities. They also took surveys and engaged in group activities to further explore these concepts and their community’s unique assets.
2024 Studio Reports
Dr. Bergtold summarized the findings of each studio into a separate report. He said that these reports highlight the relative importance of various aspects and guiding principles of resilience. Each report also includes a map of the community’s capitals, showing how assets vary across communities. These findings are helpful for residents and researchers seeking to enhance community resilience.
Key takeaways from the reports:
- Kansas communities have different priorities and needs. Communities consistently considered aspects, such as “everyone has access to clean water, affordable energy, and transportation”, “everyone has access to the needed public services and resources”, and “reliable and hardened infrastructure (water, energy, and transportation”, of high importance for their communities.
- Each community has a rich array of resources and assets, as mapped out in the reports, that can be utilized to help enhance their resilience. For example, drinking water and wastewater were seen as strongly positively influencing community resilience in Johnson County, Ford County and Seward County. The level of influence of built capital, particularly water, energy and transportation infrastructures and related services, on community resilience varied across the communities.
What's next?
Dr. Bergtold and the ARISE research team plan to organize another round of studios starting in February 2025. These studios will focus on defining SMART community goals to enhance resilience and identifying actionable steps to measure progress toward these goals.