Accelerating Preparedness with Community Resilience Hubs

Climate Action Planning | Climate Adaptation and Resilience Planning | Climate Change + Sustainability | Communications + Engagement | Community + Environmental Justice | Community Climate Services | Connected, Resilient Communities | Creative and Web Services | Dashboards and Decision Support Tools | Inclusive Climate Engagement | Inclusive Community Engagement | Planning + Facilitation

Project Overview

Cascadia partnered with the City of Seattle Office of Emergency Management and City of Tacoma Office of Environmental Policy and Sustainability to support a multi-year Resilience Hubs pilot planning project, helping Puget Sound communities strengthen preparedness for both immediate and long-term disasters.

Approach and Impact

Each year, floods, wildfires, and extreme heat disrupt communities across Western Washington, while earthquakes and volcanic activity pose longer-term risks. The Resilience Hubs pilot, funded through FEMA’s Regional Catastrophic Preparedness Grant (RCPG), reframed preparedness for our region by centering the lived experience of frontline Puget Sound communities, listening and learning to understand what communities need to stay safe and connected before, during, and after a disaster.

From 2022 to 2026, Cascadia and OEM developed tools and resources to facilitate the planning of community-led Resilience Hubs—community gathering spaces that serve everyday needs and function as resource centers during emergency events. 

Cascadia developed and strengthened connections with 14 community partners throughout the Puget Sound region to directly engage their constituent communities. Each partner led their own in-culture and in-language activities to gain insight into how a regional Resilience Hub model could best support the most overburdened members of their community during different types of catastrophic, destabilizing events, with a particular emphasis on earthquakes, flooding, wildfires, extreme heat events, and poor air quality days. Over the course of the project, our team distributed more than $500,000 in direct community compensation while ensuring alignment with FEMA reporting requirements. 

Cascadia created a wide array of engagement tools and resources to support community partners and others who might wish to replicate this project, such as a project dashboard, ArcGIS StoryMap, project management toolkits, reporting templates, communications and engagement toolkits, and in-language hazard factsheets in 26 different languages developed by our own Translation, Transcreation, and Interpretation (TTI) team. Cascadia provided topical technical assistance to community partners to understand specific hazard risks and expanded community capacity for emergency preparedness and community-led response by leading trainings for community partner staff who would be responsible for operationalizing Resilience Hubs.

By strengthening community capacity and reinforcing connections between agencies and communities, the Resilience Hubs planning model advances more community-centered, locally grounded preparedness and emergency response across the Puget Sound region—supporting accurate reimbursements, improving program consistency, and informing long-term decision-making.

Explore the ArcGIS StoryMap

The Puget Sound Resilience Hubs ArcGIS StoryMap provides information on what resilience hubs are, guidance to build a resilience hub, snapshots of natural hazards for our region and their potential impacts on communities, and key partnerships to aid in resilience hub deployment and management. 

This resource is being used to strengthen the feedback loop between the Office of Emergency Management and its constituent communities and ensure that community is centered in resilience planning throughout the Puget Sound region.

https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/f71d4e26a1854667aef12114e28de5b1/page/Home


A FEMA-funded regional pilot is reshaping how communities prepare for disasters across Puget Sound. By centering community leadership and investing in local capacity, Cascadia supported the collaborative design of resilience hubs that reflect local knowledge, strengthen connections, and expand access to critical resources in times of crisis.

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