About COPEWELL

Since 2011, the COPEWELL project has been funded through grants and contracts provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to create a whole of community approach to better define and understand the relationship between resilience and disasters. The outcome of this work is the development of tools and resources that communities can employ to bolster efforts to improve community functioning and resilience before, during, and after disasters.

Development Process

The goals of COPEWELL are to provide communities a way to understand resilience and its influencers, assess community functioning and resilience, and spark action to enhance functioning and resilience.

To achieve these goals, the COPEWELL project team has:

• Developed a conceptualization of resilience, based on community functioning
• Developed a computational model, based on system dynamics
• Identified, collected, and evaluated measures to populate the computational model, at the county level
• Developed a set of self-assessment rubrics and associated implementation guides to complement the measures and the model
• Curated a set of toolkits, documents, and guides to help address gaps and strengthen community functioning and resilience
• Engaged stakeholders in a variety of settings to ensure COPEWELL’s utility.

The project team consists of faculty, staff, and students from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Delaware, as well as external consultants.