Answer: The understanding of how best to plan for and respond to environmental challenges can be enhanced through topical trainings and workshops that offer technical guidance to decision-makers. When targeted to their needs, such offerings can help build capacity to make informed decisions about community resilience. Therefore, an increase in participants receiving training should lead to an increase in community decision-making capacity. Furthermore, continuously engaging new participants should help ensure that staff turnover is accounted for and that new communities have the opportunity to build their decision-making capacity, laying the foundation for better-informed adaptation to extreme weather, flooding, and other environmental challenges.
*The Objective’s Measure of Success defines reasonable outcomes and ensure that progress towards the Objective can be clearly and precisely tracked over time.
Based on the Measure of Success, the overall status of this Objective is:
In 2025, 62 new leaders have been engaged, while 168 municipal, nonprofit, and community leaders received training.
The primary measure of success is to engage 100 new decision-makers through Partnership trainings and resources every year.
Since 2022, a team of Sustainable and Resilience Communities Extension Professionals have held a number of trainings and workshops for Long Island Sound decision-makers to provide information on tools and resources, best management practices, funding, and topical issues related to resilience. The training programs have been developed based on findings from a 2023 Needs Assessment and ongoing community needs. From January 2022-December 2024, over 800 decision-makers were engaged through these trainings and workshops. From January 2025-September 2025, 168 decision-makers have been engaged through SRC trainings and workshops, including 62 new decision-makers. Tracking both the total and new decision-makers engaged each year provides an indicator of progress in meeting the overall objective. We anticipate an increasing number of both total and new participants as the reach of our training programs continues to grow. In the future, we anticipate the number of new participants to remain proportionate to the total as we account for both new interest and staff turnover.
The availability and capacity of decision-makers to engage in resilience training and workshops can be variable depending on many factors.
It is important to continue engaging new participants in addition to returning participants as repeat and new training programs share new information and best practices, and help to build decision-making capacity. Engaging new participants is important as it expands the reach of the Partnership and increases capacity in both new communities and those that may be dealing with a loss of institutional knowledge through staff turnover.
Deb Abibou, CT Sea Grant, deb.abibou@uconn.edu Sara Powell, NY Sea Grant, slp285@cornell.edu
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