Building Community Continuity for 2026 and Beyond

By Stephen Jordan

Communities today face disruptions that never trigger a federal disaster declaration — cyber incidents, heat waves, housing shocks, supply-chain interruptions, failing infrastructure, and more. Traditional disaster response frameworks were not built for this reality. They activate after something breaks. But what communities increasingly need is an approach that protects lives, livelihoods, and living environments every day, not only in crisis.

This broader approach is known as resilience, and when applied at the local level, it takes the form of community continuity.

Community continuity mirrors what individuals and businesses do to manage life’s risks. Individuals buy insurance, maintain their homes and vehicles, and choose products with built-in safety features. Businesses invest in business continuity: planning, training, infrastructure, and operational redundancies that minimize downtime and accelerate recovery. Community continuity builds on these same principles — but at the scale of whole populations and essential systems.

Although the idea is intuitive, the field itself is still emerging. A review of recent literature shows that community continuity as a term only began gaining traction in the last 18 months. Since then, academic centers, resilience offices, think tanks, and policy analysts have introduced new language to describe what communities truly need:

• continuity of social functioning

• community continuity

• everyday resilience systems

The shared insight: traditional disaster frameworks address the tail-end shocks, not the chronic stresses that weaken communities long before — and long after — emergencies occur.

Recognizing this gap, the Institute for Sustainable Development has convened more than 50 experts to launch the Academy for Community Resilience and Development — a new national training platform designed to help local governments, businesses, and civic organizations shift from reactive emergency response to proactive community continuity.

We are advancing this work through university partnerships, workshops in disaster-prone regions, expert guest lectures, and our continuing webinar series with StateBook, whose CEO Calandra Cruikshank also serves as an ISD Fellow.

What’s Coming in 2026

Throughout the year, the Academy will explore and teach the essential elements of community continuity:

• Community Continuity Fundamentals

A foundational webinar introducing the five-part continuity model illustrated above.

• State & Local Economic Resilience and Disaster Recovery Management

A 40-hour certificate course for professionals in planning, economic development, emergency management, sustainability, and business continuity.

• Building a Continuity-Based Resilience and Recovery Office

A practical workshop for cities and counties seeking to operationalize continuity across departments.

• Public–Private Continuity Partnerships

A hands-on course in designing, governing, and sustaining cross-sector resilience coalitions and community resilience networks.

Many of these tools and concepts are not new. Community resilience networks were pioneered in the late 1990s. Parametric insurance models have been successfully deployed internationally. ISD Fellows have been advocating for small business “credit for resilience” funds for nearly a decade. But until now, these solutions were often treated as isolated innovations.

The ISD Academy is uniquely positioned to show how these methods fit together into a coherent strategy for governing resilience. Over the last 40 years, the economic and social costs of disasters have risen faster than even health care expenditures. That trend is unsustainable — and unnecessary.

Community continuity offers a path forward: one that prevents avoidable harm, accelerates recovery, strengthens local economies, and creates safer, more stable environments for everyone.