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Urban communities in environmentally sensitive areas face escalating challenges due to climate change and inadequate infrastructural support, particularly in underserved regions like southside Norfolk, Virginia. This area, characterized by its vulnerability to flooding and a predominantly low-income population, lacks equitable inclusion in broader urban flood protection plans. This research focuses on the development of community-centered resilience strategies through active engagement and collaboration with local residents. The methodology centered around building trust and understanding within the community through a series of interactions and events. This approach facilitated a two-way exchange of information, enabling the research team to gather crucial insights on community-valued assets, prevalent flooding issues, and preferred flood mitigation solutions. The engagement revealed a significant increase in community knowledge regarding climate change, sea level rise, and stormwater management. Residents expressed a strong preference for green infrastructure solutions, including rain gardens, permeable pavements, and living shorelines, alongside concerns about pollution and the need for infrastructure redesign. The outcomes of this community engagement have initiated plans to develop tailored, nature-based flooding solutions. These results are set to inform future urban planning and policy, offering insights to the City of Norfolk and the United States Army Corps of Engineers for potential redesigns of flood intervention strategies that are more inclusive and effective. A template for participatory research to inform coastal hazard management includes cross-sector collaboration, a long-term engagement commitment, and education and surveying opportunities to align solutions to lived, local experiences. This template allows for community trust building, which is especially important in environmental justice communities. The study highlights the importance of community involvement in urban resilience planning, demonstrating that local engagement is essential in shaping community-centric solutions and equitable environmental policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on literature on nonprofit resilience to hazards to explore the impact of federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans on nonprofits' staffing, services, and financial health during the COVID-19 pandemic's first year. Through propensity score matching with survey data collected in spring 2020 and winter 2021 from the New Orleans area, linked to publicly available PPP data, nonprofits that did and did not receive a PPP loan were matched on covariates representing critical resilience capacities pre-pandemic, allowing calculation of effect sizes for short-term outcomes. Results suggest that PPP tentatively supported nonprofit liquidity in the form of reserves, but had at best mixed results in promoting service maintenance, and did not support hiring or staff retention in excess of the non-treatment group. Despite the small sample size, these preliminary findings inform how PPP may have supported short-term sustainability and help guide future federal policy to support nonprofits during crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Food is not equitably available. Deficiencies and generalizations limit national datasets, food security assessments, and interventions. Additional neighborhood level studies are needed to develop a scalable and transferable process to complement national and internationally comparative data sets with timely, granular, nuanced data. Participatory geographic information systems (PGIS) offer a means to address these issues by digitizing local knowledge. Methods: The objectives of this study were two-fold: (i) identify granular locations missing from food source and risk datasets and (ii) examine the relation between the spatial, socio-economic, and agency contributors to food security. Twenty-nine subject matter experts from three cities in Southeastern Virginia with backgrounds in food distribution, nutrition management, human services, and associated research engaged in a participatory mapping process. Results: Results show that publicly available and other national datasets are not inclusive of non-traditional food sources or updated frequently enough to reflect changes associated with closures, expansion, or new programs. Almost 6 percent of food sources were missing from publicly available and national datasets. Food pantries, community gardens and fridges, farmers markets, child and adult care programs, and meals served in community centers and homeless shelters were not well represented. Over 24 km2 of participant identified need was outside United States Department of Agriculture low income, low access areas. Economic, physical, and social barriers to food security were interconnected with transportation limitations. Recommendations address an international call from development agencies, countries, and world regions for intervention methods that include systemic and generational issues with poverty, incorporate non-traditional spaces into food distribution systems, incentivize or regulate healthy food options in stores, improve educational opportunities, increase data sharing. Conclusions: Leveraging city and regional agency as appropriate to capitalize upon synergistic activities was seen as critical to achieve these goals, particularly for non-traditional partnership building. To address neighborhood scale food security needs in Southeastern Virginia, data collection and assessment should address both environment and utilization issues from consumer and producer perspectives including availability, proximity, accessibility, awareness, affordability, cooking capacity, and preference. The PGIS process utilized to facilitate information sharing about neighborhood level contributors to food insecurity and translate those contributors to intervention strategies through discussion with local subject matter experts and contextualization within larger scale food systems dynamics is transferable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building resilience to flooding is a commitment of several universities; however, student interest in flood education programs is unclear. The goals of this research are three‐fold: 1) to determine the origin of flood messaging on the Old Dominion University (ODU) campus, 2) to assess on‐campus flood awareness, and 3) to evaluate the interest in additional flood education. This study evaluates student awareness of flooding via a survey of ODU students and contextual analysis of University warning messages. Many students experienced reduced access to campus as a result of flooding and expressed an interest in additional flood information. Some students reported receiving flood‐related information through in‐class instruction or orientation‐based programming. However, the content varies in detail, and ODU could formally integrate additional resources into outreach and flood education programming. These findings could support the development of a campus wide flood awareness program at ODU and other universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In New Zealand, where nonprofit and government partnerships have been formally developing since the 1990s, pathways for nonprofits to improve outcomes for affected communities were open when a magnitude 7.1 earthquake occurred in rural Canterbury on 4 September 2010. As more than 13,000 aftershocks followed, including a 6.3 magnitude event on 22 February 2011 that caused fatalities and widespread structural damage in the city of Christchurch, significant action was organized in the nonprofit sector to revitalize the city. New nonprofit initiatives emerged in the central business district to address social concerns and foster engagement across the sector. This case study, undertaken three to four years after the most severe earthquakes, compared experiences from thirty-six local nonprofit organizations regarding collaboration within the nonprofit sector. Results showed that integrating nonprofit commitments to and perceptions of demands for social services into representative collective efforts supported sustainable organizational resilience into midterm recovery. Overamalgamation and prolonged restructuring, however, limited some collective efforts. Longitudinal analysis enabled development of a scalable connective structure for sustaining network resilience into long-term recovery, including collective action and collaborative issue assessment groups. Proactive implementation of similar partnerships might facilitate sustainable resilience in other urban multihazard settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of anthropogenic climate change, the ability of communities to reduce the heat-health burden remains a significant public health issue. This research is the first to identify cooling centers across the southeastern United States, providing a resource for stakeholders. The study evaluates the spatial relationship of these venues for heat-vulnerable populations. Using a survey and publicly available data, researchers identified 1,433 cooling centers, though significant variability exists across states and local jurisdictions. Of the nine states examined, Tennessee was the only location with a health system–supported cooling center network. Only 36 percent of the Southeast's population lives within a fifteen-minute drive of a cooling center. In most states, less than 10 percent of vulnerable populations (elderly, non-white, below poverty) are within this driveshed. Most cooling centers were found in urban environments, although heat vulnerability is not exclusively a city issue. Further research is needed to strengthen cross-agency collaboration and evaluate the effectiveness of cooling centers in areas of both high and low population density. Some states have integrated heat as part of hazard mitigation plans, but additional research is needed to explore how these plans go beyond hazard identification and strengthen vulnerable communities' ability to mitigate heat risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the 2010–2011 earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, many nonprofit organizations changed or expanded services to address emergent or compounded risks. This research is based on interviews with thirty local community nonprofit managers and discussions with five staff focus groups conducted in 2014. Preexisting nonprofits with flexible organizational structures and emergent nonprofits succeeded in providing services during the emergency response and early recovery phases; nonprofits contracted with the government were better suited for long-term recovery. Shared resources among nonprofit agency connections contributed to successful transitions from response to recovery. Similar organizational resilience factors might occur in other major cities following disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake, citizens increasingly turned to third sector organisations (TSOs) for social services. Spatial patterns of traditional vulnerability metrics from the 2006 and 2013 census were interpreted, based on surveys of local TSOs. TSOs were found to have maintained business as usual, and evolved to the demands the recovering city was making on their organisations and clients. Weighted vulnerability indices demonstrated that the vulnerability factors of renting and social assistance were identified by TSOs as being amplified by the earthquake. These raised vulnerability in 54 to 65 per cent of the area units in the Christchurch City District. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The city has also been variously termed "Southeastern Virginia", and its Census Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) remains "Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, VA-NC, MSA." In recent decades, various institutions have increasingly adopted the "Hampton Roads" name, including those that span the individual cities, such as Hampton Roads Planning District Commission, Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization, and the Hampton Roads Sanitation District. In 1680, the town of Norfolk was officially named (after Norfolk, England) when the Virginia Assembly established a trading center. Norfolk, Virginia, is the host city of the 78th annual meeting of the Southeastern Division of the American Association of Geographers (SEDAAG). [Extracted from the article]

• Examined how vulnerability and COVID-19 alter evacuation behavior. • People afraid of COVID-19 exposure may refuse to evacuate. • Web and phone surveys were conducted in the Hampton Roads area of U.S. Virginia. • Developed a multinomial order logit model on factors and intended decisions. • Race and risk perception influence the decision-making evacuation process. Historical data suggest that when a severe tropical storm or hurricane impacts a community, the vulnerable segment of the population suffers the most severe consequences. With an increased aging population, it is crucial to understand how vulnerability alters evacuation behavior. Emergent variables such as fear of COVID-19 require additional exploration. People afraid of COVID-19 exposure may refuse to evacuate, exposing themselves unnecessarily. Differentiation is critical to evacuation logistics since it is needed to determine what proportion would stay in a local shelter, public or other, rather than evacuating or staying in their home and guide the logistics resource allocation process. This research uses data from a web and phone survey conducted in the Hampton Roads area of U.S. Virginia, with 2,200 valid responses to analyze the influence of social and demographic vulnerability factors and risk perception on evacuation decisions. This research contributes to the existing literature by developing a multinomial order logit model based on vulnerability factors and intended evacuation decisions, including staying at home, looking for a shelter, or leaving the Hampton Roads area. Findings show that race and risk perception are the variables that influence the decision-making process the most. Fear of COVID-19 transmission is also associated with an increased likelihood of leaving homes during evacuation. The variations in findings from previous studies are discussed regarding their implications for logistics emergency managers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]