Strategic plan
A rural resilience institute and living laboratory that turns ecological stewardship, disaster preparedness, housing resilience, practical education, applied research, and civic collaboration into usable local capacity.
This is a plan, not a prospectus. Nothing described here is open yet. These programs are contingent on completing the rebuild and on the funding that follows it, and the sequence below is our current thinking rather than a schedule we have committed to. We publish it because funders, partners, and neighbors reasonably want to know what this place is being built for — and because we would rather be held to a plan we stated plainly.
How it would work
The operating model is the same at every scale, and it is the reason the rebuild and the programs are one project rather than two:
- Demonstrate solutions on the site or in partner communities.
- Train residents, landowners, local leaders, and practitioners to adapt them.
- Measure results and publish replicable tools.
- Convene cross-sector partners to improve local planning and public decisions.
Who this is for
Rural residents; farmers, ranchers, and landowners; volunteer fire and emergency personnel; young people; local elected officials and staff; watershed, conservation, and extension professionals; small nonprofits; schools; and faith and mutual-aid groups.
The twelve programs
A menu, not a launch list. Each entry describes what the program would do, what it would produce, and who we would expect to do it with.
A workshop, field day, or gathering in progress
Foundation — programs that could start with limited infrastructure
These establish the Institute's public identity and produce evidence from the first day.
Resilience Readiness Workshops & Field School
Recurring short-format classes and hands-on field sessions, built in modules so landowners, households, young people, staff, and volunteers can each take what they need without entering a long programme.
Would produce: a seasonal workshop calendar, train-the-trainer materials, recorded lessons, field manuals.
Would work with: extension services, volunteer fire departments, libraries, schools, maker spaces, conservation organizations, local tradespeople.
Community Resilience Leadership Academy
Cohort-based training for residents and local leaders, each participant working on a practical community project. Risk assessment, facilitation, inclusive engagement, grant readiness, volunteer systems, conflict navigation, communications, and measurement.
Would produce: participant project plans, a peer-learning network, a mentor roster, a leadership toolkit, public capstone presentations.
Would work with: community foundations, schools, local government, Tribal governments where relevant, service organizations, emergency managers, universities.
Rural Preparedness & Mutual Aid Network
Practical readiness at the household and neighborhood level, while preserving community autonomy: preparedness circles, skills exchanges, supply-sharing protocols, check-in systems for vulnerable neighbors, and neighborhood communication plans.
Would produce: preparedness circles, volunteer rosters, resource maps, skills inventories, household checklists, tabletop exercises.
Would work with: mutual-aid groups, senior-services agencies, disability organizations, public-health partners, neighborhood associations, faith communities.
Applied Research, Data & Learning Lab
Turning local programs into credible, useful knowledge. Baseline data, tracked outcomes, documented lessons, and practical publications other rural places can reuse. Participatory by design, and protective of community privacy.
Would produce: an annual rural resilience report, evaluation briefs, open templates, monitoring protocols, case studies, a digital resource library.
Would work with: universities, extension researchers, community foundations, local governments, GIS volunteers, citizen-science networks.
Demonstration — programs that make the Institute tangible
These are what distinguish a living laboratory from a conventional training provider: things a visitor can see, price, and copy.
The demonstration home, or a restoration site with visible work
Resilient Homestead & Rural Housing Lab
Working demonstration homes and retrofitted structures showing affordable risk reduction for heat, flood, drought, storms, wildfire smoke, outages, and water disruption — rainwater capture, backup power, passive cooling, resilient landscaping, home hardening, emergency communications, accessible sheltering, and low-cost retrofits.
Would produce: public tours, design guides, bill-of-materials sheets, contractor and DIY workshops, household resilience checklists, before-and-after performance case studies.
Would work with: extension services, rural housing nonprofits, volunteer builders, community colleges, local utilities, emergency management, disability-access advocates.
Watershed, Creek & Floodplain Demonstration
Restoring and monitoring small waterways and adjacent land to reduce erosion and flood impacts while improving habitat and water quality: native buffers, riparian planting, bioswales, rain gardens, contour management, wetland restoration, invasive-species control, runoff reduction.
Would produce: demonstration sites, seasonal field days, restoration plans, volunteer monitoring, photo points, stream-condition reports, landowner practice guides.
Would work with: soil and water conservation districts, watershed groups, land trusts, extension, universities, floodplain managers, neighboring landowners.
Rural Water Security Initiative
Helping households and small communities prepare for drought, contamination, well failure, freeze events, and power interruptions — water assessment, storage, rainwater harvesting where lawful, well stewardship, low-cost filtration, conservation, and emergency distribution planning.
Would produce: water-security assessments, household preparedness workshops, demonstration systems, a local water-resource directory, community contingency plans.
Would work with: rural water utilities, public-health departments, extension, conservation districts, mutual-aid organizations, rural community assistance partners.
Regenerative Land & Farm Resilience
Helping agricultural and working-land stewards reduce drought, flood, erosion, heat, and wildfire vulnerability while improving soil, biodiversity, and farm viability: soil health, rotational grazing, agroforestry, water retention, native habitat, farm energy resilience, and disaster recovery.
Would produce: on-farm demonstrations, producer peer groups, field days, land-management decision tools, cost-share and grant navigation, case studies.
Would work with: conservation districts, NRCS-connected partners, producer groups, extension, land-grant universities, farm-to-school networks.
Replication — programs that extend beyond this place
The long-term aim is that the work does not depend on us.
Rural Resilience Planning Clinic
Structured technical assistance for small towns, counties, neighborhood groups, and local nonprofits without planning capacity: hazard and asset mapping, community listening, risk-priority setting, project design, grant alignment, and action-plan creation.
Would produce: community resilience plans, project pipelines, grant-ready scopes, facilitated meetings, risk and asset maps, planning templates.
Would work with: local governments, regional planning commissions, emergency management, utilities, universities, nonprofit technical-assistance networks.
Community Resilience Hub Network
Supporting trusted local sites — libraries, schools, community centers, faith buildings, volunteer-fire stations — to function during disruptions as information points, charging and communications locations, cooling or warming spaces, supply coordination sites, and neighbor-to-neighbor support nodes.
Would produce: hub readiness assessments, site standards, operating guides, mutual-aid protocols, exercises, communications plans, partner agreements.
Would work with: libraries, schools, faith communities, local health providers, volunteer fire departments, amateur radio groups, mutual-aid networks.
Youth Rural Futures & Stewardship Corps
Engaging young people in ecological monitoring, restoration, hazard awareness, civic leadership, and practical trades — with a visible path from service learning toward paid seasonal work, internships, or community-college credentials.
Would produce: youth field teams, restoration and service projects, oral-history work, a youth advisory council, internships, a public showcase, skills badges.
Would work with: schools, 4-H, FFA, conservation corps, libraries, community colleges, workforce boards, parks departments.
Rural Policy Education & Civic Collaboration
Nonpartisan research, public education, and convenings on the local decisions that shape rural risk: floodplain management, water security, land use, housing, emergency communications, conservation funding, and infrastructure. Education and convening — never candidates, never parties.
Would produce: policy briefs, candidate-neutral issue forums, public comment guides, stakeholder roundtables, local-policy toolkits.
Would work with: policy institutes, planning commissions, conservation organizations, municipal associations, civic groups.
The order we would build in
Sequence, not schedule. Each phase depends on the one before it and on funding we do not yet have.
Phase one — establishing the practice
- Open the Field School with a small calendar of workshops: household preparedness, rural water security, land stewardship, local hazard mapping, grant-readiness basics.
- Convene a first Leadership Academy cohort, each participant linked to a practical community project.
- Complete a resilience baseline — hazards, assets, vulnerable systems, partner map, monitoring plan.
- Build one modest, heavily documented demonstration project: a rainwater and backup-power installation, a native drainage or rain-garden project, or a creek-buffer restoration segment.
- Host a recurring Rural Resilience Roundtable with landowners, agencies, emergency personnel, educators, and community groups.
- Publish a first learning brief: what was tested, who took part, what it cost, what worked, what failed, what comes next.
Phase two — from one site to a network
- Expand from a single demonstration toward a connected resilience campus or a distributed network of partner sites.
- Open the Planning Clinic to one or two rural communities or unincorporated areas.
- Formalize one or more resilience hubs, with agreements, equipment plans, volunteer roles, and exercises.
- Develop a landowner and farmer demonstration network, with seasonal field days.
- Release an annual State of the Community report on rural resilience.
Phase three — work that outlasts us
- Replicate the programs that worked through a train-the-trainer, affiliate, or chapter model.
- Offer fee-supported technical assistance and training where mission-compatible, while keeping free or subsidized access for under-resourced rural participants.
- Establish academic and evaluation partnerships for multi-year research.
- Convene a regional rural resilience summit, and publish a policy agenda grounded in documented local need and nonpartisan research.
What a pathway looks like
A household attends a water-security workshop and assesses its well, storage, filtration, backup power, and communications. It joins a neighborhood preparedness circle. It hosts a small rainwater or drainage demonstration. It contributes observations to watershed monitoring. It takes part in a community planning clinic.
That is the whole idea in one sentence: turning a single educational event into a pathway toward household, neighborhood, and public-system resilience.
Standards we would hold ourselves to
Evidence plus usability
Technical credibility paired with clear, low-cost, rural-appropriate instructions.
Demonstrate before prescribing
Make projects visitable. Publish cost, labor, permitting, maintenance, benefits — and limitations.
Community-led
Compensate local knowledge, include residents early, and return data and findings to the community in usable forms.
Equity and accessibility
Designed for older adults, disabled residents, low-income households, renters, isolated residents, limited broadband, and varied literacy levels.
Privacy and data sovereignty
Collect only what learning requires. Obtain consent. Use plain-language data practices. Never publish sensitive household or vulnerability information.
Nonpartisan civic engagement
Educate the public and convene stakeholders around issues and evidence — not candidates, not parties.
How we would measure it
Illustrative measures, published as we go — including the ones that do not flatter us. Detail on our measurement framework and its alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals is on the impact page.
| Area | Illustrative measures |
|---|---|
| Education | Participants trained; repeat participation; workshops delivered; skills gained; train-the-trainer graduates. |
| Demonstration | Sites built or restored; visitors; guides downloaded; documented costs; maintenance completion; practices replicated elsewhere. |
| Environmental outcomes | Acres improved; native vegetation installed; runoff retained; water-quality trends; erosion reduction; habitat indicators. |
| Household resilience | Households with water, power, communications, evacuation, cooling or warming, and neighbor-check-in plans. |
| Community capacity | Active partners; local leaders trained; resilience hubs prepared; volunteer hours; mutual-aid circles; exercises completed. |
| Planning and policy | Plans adopted; grant applications submitted and awarded; projects funded; policy briefings; public meetings convened. |
| Learning and replication | Case studies released; external groups using our tools; partner sites established; earned revenue reinvested in mission. |
People carrying something back — a visitor, a landowner, a young person at work
Why this, and why here
Asher Acres can be a living rural resilience laboratory: a trusted place where people see real projects, learn directly from implementation, get evidence and affordable plans, meet peers, and carry solutions back to their own homes, farms, organizations, and communities.
Not a report about resilience. A place you can walk through.
None of it happens without the rebuild
Every program on this page assumes a site that exists. The flood took that site, and rebuilding it is the precondition for all of this.