Reaching the unreached: Building resilience through engagement with diverse communities

The Department of Homeland Security Center for Faith-based & Neighborhood Partnerships (DHS Center) is one of 13 federal centres whose mandate is to engage faith-based and community groups with governments in the delivery of human services. Working alongside local jurisdictions, over the past five years, the DHS Center developed the Building Resilience with Diverse Communities (BRDC) engagement process to improve relationships with faith-based and community organisations and to ‘reach unreached’ populations in emergency preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation. BRDC works to improve community resilience by engaging the ‘whole community’ through its seven-stage process. The BRDC process has been successfully implemented in Los Angeles, California, Lakewood, New Jersey and in varying degrees in other communities. The initiative demonstrates that emergency management can adapt the BRDC process to effectively integrate faith-based and community groups into their plans and processes, leverage existing resources and, by doing so, increase resilience with some of the hardest to reach and unreached populations in their jurisdictions.