Leaders from government, the private sector, academia, and Virginia Sustainable Building Network (VSBN) came together in July 2014 to form a new organization — Resilient Virginia — to accelerate resiliency planning in Virginia communities. This organization is a transformation of VSBN, an organization that worked across the state for 18 years to bring building owners and managers a broad range of educational opportunities and programs about high performance buildings that use less energy, provide healthy indoor environments, and reduce impact on natural resources.

Resilient Virginia expands our organizational horizons beyond the built environment to address the many variables involved in community resiliency.

Our mission is to launch a Community Resiliency Initiative in Virginia that will provide residents, businesses and governments with the ability to adapt and thrive despite changing environmental, social, and economic conditions. Resiliency brings together many areas of community functioning which often operate independently. These include:

• the built environment,
• ecosystem services and the natural environment,
• energy production,
• food and water security,
• emergency preparedness,
• economic risk management,
• health services,
• transportation,
• communication, and
• education.

Resilient Virginia will serve the critical function of bringing together national, state, and local resiliency expertise and resources, and acting as a dissemination point from which these resources can be distributed statewide. Resilient Virginia will utilize its expert staff and partner resources to reach out to normally disaggregated groups within a community and engage them in mutually beneficial educational initiatives focused on resiliency plan development. 

By educating diverse elements of communities about resiliency components and building collaborative relationships, community structure will be strengthened. These communities can then be more successful in continuing to function as centers of economic production and sources of essential services and resources despite the challenges they may encounter.

Support Resilient Virginia! Download our Sponsor & Membership form to support the Resilient Community Initiative. It‘s our future!