The Rockefeller Foundation’s Resilience Academies and Capacity-Building Initiative was designed to support the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s National Disaster Resilience Competition. This initiative provided intensive regional workshops to more than 50 eligible jurisdictions that experienced Presidentially Declared Disasters between 2011 and 2013.  The Rockefeller Foundation partnered with the Urban Institute to assess the initiative’s effectiveness.

Key findings show that having prior knowledge with resilience concepts and experience with resilience project implementation was strongly tied to post-Academy participant outcomes. Above all, the Academies provided an opportunity to broaden participants’ understanding of resilience and operationalize the concept into specific working processes and arrangements.