Engaging Stakeholders in a Preliminary Urban Assessment: Workshop Facilitation Materials and Background Reading On Using Stakeholder Engagement and The Resilience Approach to Identify Entry Points for Building Urban Resilience:

This document provides materials for the planning and delivery of a workshop to engage with stakeholders and, using systems thinking, to begin an urban assessment. The overall goal is that this will be one of the first steps to developing integrated programming at the community level to build overall urban resilience.

Stakeholder engagement is a core component of a preliminary urban assessment. Both people in vulnerable communities AND the people who provide, design, maintain, and make and enforce policies about access to services and resources have key perspectives on community and city vulnerability. Only by enabling dialogue with and between people from both groups, and with people working at the community but also the city, regional, and possibly national scale, can you really begin to identify opportunities for RCRC action that will build city-wide resilience.

The other three core components of a preliminary urban assessment are:

Using systems thinking to analyze risk and vulnerability,

Appling systems thinking at multiple scales so that you understand not just the issues within a given vulnerable community, but also the causes and implications of that vulnerability at the city and possibly national scale,

Using mapping and secondary sources to support your assessments at the city, regional and national scales and communicate to other stakeholders the importance of your findings.

In the stakeholder engagement workshop outlined here, all four of these components are introduced and used to explore community and city-wide vulnerability and the opportunities for action. Keywords: Local Empowerment; Resilience and Climate Change Adaptation; Shared Learning Processes; Systems Thinking