Are you concerned,
as I am, about our community’s ability to bounce back from the effects of the coronavirus?
“Resiliency” is used to describe the ability to recover from a disruption like
the pandemic or climate change and to plan for, adapt to, and even thrive
during times of great change.
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| Figure 1: The Student Food Forest on Campus (photo credit: Emily Thompson) |
I recently had the opportunity to attend the 2020 Higher Education Conference on Climate Leadership in Atlanta, GA. The conference was hosted by Second Nature (formerly the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education), and the key point I took away was that resiliency is something for which we can plan. We can plan for resiliency in a business, a state, a country and even a community college, like the one where I teach.
Fantastic! To plan for a resilient future for our
community college, we can look at some of the dimensions
of resiliency that need to be implemented. To be effective, the plan should be made by stakeholders at our college and the surrounding
communities.
The first dimension is
social equity and governance.
There are a couple of issues to
address here. Do we have strong networks
between our community college and surrounding communities and is our governance
inclusive of all participating groups in the community?
If we imaging governance as a tree,
the tree will only stand if the roots in the community are strong. If they are not strong in one neighborhood,
on one side, the tree will fall in a heavy wind.
For
example, what we see with regard to the coronavirus is that Blacks in our state
have a higher rate of infection and death than whites, according to Thebault, Ba
Tran, Williams, 2020 (more here). If we then want to create a resiliency plan that addresses the coronavirus pandemic
and we’re looking at governance, we need representation from Blacks as well as
white for there to be equity.
Additionally, our college must have
strong town-gown connections that can be leveraged in times of great change. Existing
networks make it far easier to share knowledge and resources when needed. For example, in the current pandemic, the department heads at our community college donated gloves and masks to staff at
nearby medical facilities.
The second dimension is
health and wellness.
The issue here is, do all groups on campus and our larger
community have food, water, housing and health care?
Well,
we know they don’t. In the two cities near our community college, roughly 25% or
more of the residents are living in poverty (U.S. Census Bureau, 2018), which
leads to disparities in access to food, water, housing, healthcare and overall health. One way to see this is in disparities in
asthma prevalence. In Washtenaw County,
19% of adults and 10% of children have asthma.
Alarmingly, the incidence of asthma is 37% for Blacks/African Americans
in Washtenaw County, according to a report from Washtenaw County Public Health
(2013; you can read it here). For comparison, the CDC reports
that nationally, 8% of adults and 8% of children have asthma and 11% of Blacks
nationally have asthma (Centers for Disease Control, Asthma Surveillance, 2018; read it here).
Some studies have hinted at better health outcomes
among populations of asthma patients receiving better food. Wood et al. (2012)
did a randomized clinical trial of the effects of diet on asthma, finding that
patients eating 5 servings of vegetables and two of fruit each day had the best
relief of asthma symptoms (more here ). Going
back to the tree analogy, even trees feed one another through their roots in
times of stress (read it here). We will need to work on getting high quality,
locally grown food on campus and into the surrounding communities in order to
ensure better health that may fight asthma.
Additional actions can be taken to provide additional resiliency in the
dimension of health and wellness.
Figure 1 shows the Student Food Forest at the community college and Figure 2 shows a Farmer's Market in the community. These are both examples of ways to increase the health and wellness of members of the community.
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| Figure 2. Healthy Food (Photo Credit: a2gov.org) |
The third dimension is
infrastructure.
The question to answer here is, in
the event of another pandemic or a climate change disaster, are our communication
and transportation systems resilient? Using
the tree analogy, the roots of trees provide conduits for both chemical communication
and transport of nutrients. (Read about it here ). If the root system is not well-developed, the tree will receive less information and fewer goods in times of stress. So it is in our community.
In terms of communication during the current coronavirus situation, the faculty at our community college worked tremendously hard to put their classes online in one week . However, not all students
have computers or internet access. To plan for resiliency, we need to find ways to make computers and the
Internet accessible to all.
We do have
pretty good public transportation to our community college, although it is not especially
convenient or timely. Looking to the
immediate future with the coronavirus, if we decide to have on campus classes
in the fall, we will have to find a way to get students to campus. Because students may not be able to afford gas for their cars during the expected economic downturn, we could consider running an electric bus service (less polluting!) into the nearby neighborhoods. We’ll have to study
this dimension to find ways to build resiliency into both our community's communication and
transportation systems.
In summary, the community college and
surrounding communities need to work together on Social Equity and Governance,
Health and Wellness, and Infrastructure. In doing so, they can plan for resiliency for the future.
This blogpost was written for the benefit of students at Washtenaw Community College and the community as part of my sabbatical activities for winter 2020. I am solely responsible for the content and hold the copyright for the work. Feel free to use the information in this blog; just credit me with a link back to my blog! -Emily Thompson, Ph.D.
