Cobb Area Council adopts recovery and resilience strategy
Two-year effort by local group charts a course for the future
COBB >> At its monthly meeting tonight, (Online at: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89962837112 passcode: 207075) the Cobb Area Council (CAC) will formally adopt a long-range Cobb Mountain community resilience and development strategy, based on two years of intensive work throughout the community. The strategy document, funded by a grant from the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco and the Community First Credit Union, takes a comprehensive look at all aspects of the community and how they interact to affect long term development.
The strategy was created for the Cobb Area Council by the Seigler Springs Community Redevelopment Association (SSCRA), a local nonprofit established following the Valley Fire to help disaster-vulnerable communities self-organize and plan for the future. The strategy uses an innovative framework of seven “Community Capitals”: natural, built, social, financial, cultural, political and human, to paint a comprehensive picture of the community's assets. Eliot Hurwitz, executive director of SSCRA and principal author of the strategy noted that “using the Community Capitals Framework has allowed us to paint a very detailed picture of the community that looks at how economic development is closely tied to all aspects of local life, especially in a place recovering from, and still vulnerable to, wildfire.”
“We are very excited to have this Strategy out in the community now,” noted Cathy McCarthy, Chair of the Cobb Area Council. “It will be an important resource for our ongoing work to promote community development and resilience. We hope that all members of the community can read it, comment on it and participate in making the strategy a reality.”
Wilda Shock, past president of the Lake County Economic Development Corporation added that “The strategy presents a comprehensive path to recovery that can be embraced by the community and serve, additionally, as direction and motivation for other agencies and organizations in Lake County to follow a similar path. All elements of the community need to support one another and create relationships that will build and sustain capacity into the future. The data and analysis included in the strategy should greatly benefit the Cobb community in these efforts.”
This strategy seeks to chart a course of renewal and regeneration over the coming decade and beyond, especially in the face of intensifying climate disruption. It does this by taking a fresh look at the enduring assets of the community and focuses on building local capacity on the basis of those assets. The plan recognizes the critical role that county, state and federal policies and programs will play in its future, but also claims a major role for home-grown intelligence, energy and innovation. It is hoped that this strategy can be both a call to action, a high-level roadmap to implementation and a guide to ongoing evaluation of how the community is progressing. Finally, the plan looks at the community as a com- plex, evolving system, in which all of the elements of the community can support each other and looks to nurture positively reinforcing relationships throughout the area.
This strategy uses a “community capitals framework” that was developed in the early 2000s and is grounded in literature from multiple disciplines as a tool to help communities approach development from a systems perspective. Community capitals are assets or resources that can be utilized to produce additional resources or outcomes. The seven community capitals represent all aspects of community life and can be invested and saved or wasted and depleted. The objective of the present strategy is to use the community capitals framework to present an understandable economic development program, a fire recovery strategy and an overall approach to long term community resilience.
The strategy will be available soon at the Cobb Area Council website, www.cobareacouncil.org, (currently being redesigned) which also provides a simple way to make comments. The report can also be downloaded directly from SSCRA at this link. Comments can be addressed to elioth@sscra.org