Welcome c99 friends, to the new Resilience Group. We're hoping to create a place ("where everybody knows your name" :=) for folks interested in resilience for themselves and for their local community. More below.

Might as well :=)

What is Resilience?
Our present climate, environment, and politics ensure that very little of human creation can be sustained anymore. It is best to let go notions of “sustainability.” Within our personal control lie only those things within us: consciousness, resiliency, learning, will, compassion, discipline, and love.

Resilience covers all those practical, controllable things (skills, knowledge, training, practice, abilities, will, resourcefulness, etc.) within a person, or a small group of persons, that enable them to:
1) heal/recover faster - before events, or after setbacks, and/or
2) become more "elastic" - in that they return back to shape/form faster after setbacks.
The key is that resilience is about things within us or within our local group (family, neighbours and friends, street block, neighbourhood, village, and town).

For example, if you show me a good, practical, inexpensive way to grow potatoes and store them, then my family will be more resilient:
a) We learned new knowledge and skill (growing and storing potatoes);
b) We're freed from store-bought potatoes, so we don't eat poisonous chemicals and we have a bit more money in our pockets;
3) If this winter, potatoes are scarce in the supermarket, my family will have potatoes in storage.

Resiliency is further about practical things within that we can control, that would make us respond to life's difficulties better. Let's take climate change as an example.

I have zero control over climate change. So resilience is not about the Paris climate accords.
I do have some control over where and how I live.
So, if I can, I should think about moving away from a development on a flood plain, or an isolated coastal community.
But wherever I do live, I could do several things to become more resilient right where I am.
I could learn to grow and pickle veggies to reduce my food bill, eat more healthy, get more exercise, meet neighbours who garden, make veggies last through winter.
Those are skills I could learn that would make me more resilient in a number of good ways.

The Two Categories of Resilience

Personal Resilience
These are things like personal skills, training, family, resources, ideas, DIY, low-tech, how-to, etc. Examples:
• Could I use a rotary phone?
• What's a sickle?
• Could I power my garage and tools with solar?
• Could I grow and pickle veggies?
• Could I teach my kids about resilience?

Local Resilience
These are things about our street, neighbours, street block, neighbourhood, and local community. Examples:
• What could we neighbours and friends do together to make things happen?
• Could our neighbourhood/street block create it's own renewable energy local grid?
• Could we neighbours talk about a community garden plot?
• Could we start a tool library?
• Could the mostly-empty local church become a neighbourhood resilience centre during the week?
• Could we teach neighbours on a regular basis how to cook from scratch, can, pickle, grow, sew, etc?
• What if we made and sold things for a resilience fund through a workers cooperative?
• Suppose we organized a tree planting party in the neighbourhood/block?
• Let's get the local library onside: order in resources and books, hold skills training workshops there, etc?
• Could we neigbours discuss how to buy food locally?

The global model for local resilience is the Transition Network, which began in the town of Totnes, England. There are numerous other resources for local organizing and community defense from corporatist rule (how to stop frackers, how to get rid of franchises and foster local businesses, etc.)

Those are the only two relevant categories of resilience topics for this group.
Topics about regional, state, federal resilience are irrelevant, because we have little to no control over those. Kindly discuss such topics in the OTs and the Community Page posts.

Any resilience topic is welcome. I'm as happy to discuss finding a wind-up watch as I am discussing off-grid solar. In all posts, you are encouraged to ask questions. We could place them on a list and folks could write up something if they know about it.
You are very welcome to write an essay on any questions you might have on resilience topics (practical things inside our control).

Group Culture and Administration

Update: Membership is open: no need to apply or ask permission to post or whatever.
This is not top and we're not running a club.

Our Cultural Approach is to be as open and as democratic as possible.

• We have three facilitators: Gerrit, Martha Pearce-Smith, and Anonymous Bosch (AB).
• Feel free to write essays and comment to your heart's content.
• Remember your manners and that the group is about practical matters. C99 is a progressive site: the Resilience Group is just that, but is mainly apolitical; less ranting and more how-to is the group's main feature.
• Feel free to offer advice and assistance to make the group function more effectively.
• Above all, use compassion and humour (As Robert Fulghum said, everything we need to know, we learned in kindergarten :=)

Pointers for Essay Writers

• Announce every post title with "Resilience:" blah, blah.
• Use Martha’s flower banner as the first item - Resilience1.jpg in the image library.
• Use this post tag - resilience,followed by any others you wish
• After posting your essay, please copy it's link into AB’s Resilience Resource Library.

Thank you to everyone who has helped us get to the starting point. Enjoy the journey together. We all begin with baby steps, none of us are "there" yet.

Update: Group Needs

Please consider writing posts for us. We would welcome more writers.
Remember, you can write an essay with your questions on a any resilience topics. Folks will offer ideas in their comments.
There's no need to worry about "being a good writer;" we all just make it up as we go along and we muddle through and help each other.
If you want, Martha, AB, or I could help you with a draft or show you how to upload photos or anything else, but none of us are pretending to be experts at resilience or writing. So do feel free to just wing it :=)

Please consider being a Librarian. We need only 1 or 2 volunteers.
It's nothing onerous or difficult.
We writers spend a lot of time writing and responding to comments in posts. There's not enough time to also catch up on resource links that you folks provide in the comments.
Librarians would take a few minutes once or twice a week to go back to resilience essay and do a link sweep to add any resources to the library that got forgotten in the daily rush.

Peace be with us, if we learn and use practical ways to become more resilient,
Gerrit, Martha, and AB