Louisville Resilience Strategy
A plan designed to build resilience by creating a culture of equity, compassion, and trust.
Learn. Thrive. Live. Engage.
Louisville is a mid-America, mid-sized city enjoying the cultural confluence of Midwestern sensibilities and Southern hospitality. Like most American communities, however, Louisville faces a number of serious and interrelated social, economic and health challenges: from a city budget severely impacted by state-mandated changes in their employee pension obligation, to inequity, to the thread of increased storms, floods, and droughts in the future. These burdens and threads fall disproportionately on certain population subgroups, especially people of color and other minorities.
Louisville Context Map
Louisville’s top shocks and stresses as identified during the strategy engagement process
A historic timeline of Louisville’s key shocks and stresses
In order to achieve a successful long-term strategic plan, Louisville Resilience set forth the following list of goals in executing the stakeholder engagement plan:
Ensure transparency in our communications with and among all stakeholders;
Openly acknowledge current gaps in both the support and provision of services identified within the City Resilience Framework;
Facilitate and institutionalize a collective community conversation around resilience with the perspective of identifying opportunities from our challenges; and
Advocate for resilience in all policies for both internal and external stakeholders.
Working groups participate in discovery area meetings
The Louisville Resilience Strategy was grounded into the existing framework of the Mayor’s Strategic Planning pillars. While some modification was necessary, the mayor’s main themes applied to the work of Resilience:
The Resilience Strategy is divided into four visions. Each has a set of goals and a series of actions representing the culmination of listening to what is important to the community, aligning to existing plans and actions. Louisville is already hard at work to ensure a resilient city built upon equity, compassion and trust and that our residents recognize and value its importance.
Louisville’s Resilience Strategy focused on four key pillars that were created to address issues of inequity and lack of trust: Embrace Lifelong Learning, Ensure a Safe + Healthy City, Build a Vibrant Economy + Place, and Innovate in Civic Engagement. These pillars, along with the goals and actions outlined under them, provide a roadmap for how Louisville will grow in the coming decades.
“We are only as resilient as the least resilient of us. It’s easy to generalize, but if one person is left behind, it’s up to us all to lift them up. In a city, everything and everyone is connected.
— City of Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer
My role: Project Manager
Client: City of Louisville, as part of the 100RC (100 Resilient Cities) network
Images Credit: Perkins&Will