Neighborhood Empowerment Network – San Francisco. Empowered Communities Program Toolkit for Neighborhood-Level Resilience Planning
In 2007, an alliance of residents, neighborhood and merchant associations, non profits and faith based organizations, foundations and academic institutions was created around a simple mission, empowering the neighborhoods of San Francisco with the capacity to steward themselves to a resilient condition. The alliance assumed the name of the Neighborhood Empowerment Network (NEN) and over the last six years it has leveraged the immense resources and expertise within its ranks to create a ground breaking suite of tools resources and methodologies to advance resilience at the community level with a bottom up grass roots approach.
The Neighborhood Empowerment Network (NEN) is an alliance of residents, neighborhood and merchant associations, nonprofits and faith–based organizations, foundations and academic institutions that advance resilience at the community level with a bottom up, grassroots approach. The NEN supports the development of HUBs, which are networks of organizations that advances the community’s overall preparedness on a daily basis, as well as provides essential support to residents as they recover from a stressful event of any size. The NEN supports HUBs in crafting a culturally competent resilience action plan for the mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery phases of a disaster. There are currently 12 HUBs that are running or being launched in San Francisco.
This toolkit, developed by the Neighborhood Empowerment Network (NEN) of San Francisco in partnership with San Francisco State University’s Institute for Civic and Community Engagement and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, presents a structured, community-driven approach to building neighborhood resilience before, during, and after disasters. Originally developed in response to lessons drawn from Hurricane Katrina and adapted for San Francisco’s seismic risk context, the Empowered Communities Program (ECP) has been successfully deployed across multiple San Francisco neighborhoods since 2009.
The toolkit outlines a bottom-up, place-based capacity building process that guides neighborhood leaders through the development of a customized Resilience Action Plan (RAP) — a living strategy document that addresses community connections, organizational capacity, and physical resources across all phases of the disaster cycle. It covers the program’s governance structure, leadership models, foundational principles, and step-by-step implementation guidance, drawing on frameworks including FEMA’s Whole Community approach, the Incident Command System, collective impact theory, human-centered design, and experiential learning.