Community Economic Resilience

What is Community Economic Resilience?

Because the private sector provides so many essential services like food, clothing, and shelter, we consider CED to be more than just job creation and increasing profit margins. CED is a systems approach to problem solving for community well-being. Practicing CED focuses on addressing community needs through participatory planning processes that blend financial, social, environmental and cultural values.

In this spirit, we consider Community Economic Resilience (CER) to be an approach for maintaining our well-being while adjusting to constant changes in the world around us. Change may come in the form of natural disasters like floods and fires, or in the form of human-caused disruptions like mill closures and oil spills, but the tools and principles we use for maintaining our livelihoods are mostly the same. So CER is an extension of good CED practice by using inclusive, place-based strategies to create short-term economic opportunities while maintaining long-term community stability.

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