About Us

The Community and Regional Resilience Institute (CARRI) is housed at the Meridian Institute where their partnership leverages both organizations' deep expertise in building collaborative foundations for resilience and stability. The mission of the CARRI is to help develop and then share critical paths that any community or region may take to strengthen its ability to prepare for, respond to, and rapidly recover from significant man-made or natural disasters with minimal downtime of basic community, government, and business services. CARRI supports communities in their resilience building efforts and also works with state, regional, and national stakeholders to create incentives and support for community resilience.

CARRI is developing a common framework including processes and tools that communities and regions can use to assess their resilience, determine a resilience vision and take concrete actions that will have positive economic and social results. The framework will be a national framework usable across the country but flexible enough to recognize the great diversity of the United States, its citizens, institutions, governments and organizations. CARRI believes that such a common framework is best done in partnership, at the local, grass-roots level in a broad-based manner that is inclusive of all the elements of the community fabric - government, private business, associational, non-profit and faith-based - rather than top-driven from the federal government. For this reason, the framework is being developed cooperatively and collaboratively with practitioners in partner communities and with other organizations that have similar goals.

The Community and Regional Resilience Institute (CARRI) is dedicated to research and practical application across the full continuum of prevention, protection, response and recovery to enhance the resilience of communities and regions. CARRI seeks to assist the nation in developing an accepted, common framework for community and regional resilience that integrates the full suite of community resources into a coherent resilience pathway so that the community can get back on its feet following a natural or man-made disaster as quickly as possible.

CARRI began as an "initiative" in 2007 and is a collaborative effort between the Department of Homeland Security (Science and Technology Directorate), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and a number of academic institutions. Early CARRI activities included the engagement of a diverse collection of individuals, organizations, and government entities - with a charge to learn all that we could about the condition and path of community resiliency. While our efforts were productive and worthwhile we soon recognized that an accurate understanding of the interdependencies and connections between communities could not be achieved without the involvement of actual communities. Three communities in the Southeastern United States joined the CARRI team and brought with them an abundance of knowledge, first-hand experience, and remarkable compassion for their societies and citizens. CARRI is designed to combine community engagement activities with research activities; our Research Team is diverse and generates an interdisciplinary array of knowledge that is unsurpassed.

In October 2011, CARRI transitioned out of Oak Ridge National Laboratory to become a non-governmental organization housed at Meridian Institute. Resilient communities are our objective and research combined with practical experience is critical to ensure CARRI's expertise is based on knowledge and evidence. Together, CARRI and Meridian are well positioned to support national and international resilience building and stability efforts that require collaborative, multi-stakeholder approaches.