The Sonoma County Office of Recovery and Resiliency is Now Recruiting 1 CivicSpark Fellow  for the 2019-20 Service Year!

The Sonoma County Office of Recovery and Resiliency is looking to recruit 1 CivicSpark Fellow for the 2019-20 year to assist with developing a Sonoma County Resiliency Summit that brings together fire-impacted counties to share lessons learned and resilience practices, developing a white paper outlining the latest thinking on land use decisions for community safety, and designing a dashboard for tracking implementation progress for activities in the County’s Recovery and Resiliency Framework. 

CivicSpark is a Governor’s Initiative AmeriCorps program dedicated to building capacity for local public agencies to address community resilience to emerging environmental and social equity challenges such as: climate change, water resource management, affordable housing, and mobility. 

Each year, CivicSpark recruits 90 Fellows to serve with public agencies, NGOs, and state agencies throughout the state for 11 months. In collaboration with host organization staff, CivicSpark Fellows implement a needed sustainability or resilience project, while also building long-term capacity to ensure the work is sustained after their service year is completed.

Sonoma County Project Description

Three projects are contemplated for this Fellowship. One relates to current resiliency work, one relates to future resiliency work, and one seeks to convene a range of impacted communities to share lessons learned. These three activities can tie together with the dashboard and white paper being shared as part of the summit. Descriptions, activities, benefits, future use, and capacity added for each of the three projects is as follows:

1. Develop a dashboard for the County Recovery and Resiliency Framework. The County developed a Recovery and Resiliency Framework in response to the 2017 fires. This Framework is both aspirational and actionable. While recovery implementation began immediately after the fires, resiliency implementation is an on-going process that requires tracking many separate efforts being undertaken countywide in five primary categories: Alert and Warning, Housing, Economy, Safety Net, and Natural Resources. A dashboard will help the County visualize the key performance indicators for these five categories.
2. Author a white paper outlining latest thinking on land use decisions for community safety. There are recent studies reevaluating community safety in light of climate change, natural disasters, and long-term resiliency. These papers cover a wide range of disciplines from City and Regional Planning, Housing, Forest Management, Transportation, and Emergency Services, among others. 
3. Develop a Resiliency Summit. Many communities have experienced devastating fires over the last few years. While common themes exist between all the events, each of them was local in their impacts to the community and to their recovery. The focus of the Resiliency Summit will be to share lessons learned by Sonoma, Butte, Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Diego counties and their impacted communities. 

Learn more about CivicSpark and apply by June 1st for priority consideration at civicspark.lgc.org/join-civicspark/fellow/.