Tonight Special Disaster Preparedness And Leveraging Community Assets Meeting At Community Center

Tonight at 6:45pm, Laurelhurst Community Club's  Laurelhurst Earthquake Action Preparedness (LEAP) is holding a special event called "Planning for Resilience: The Role of Place-based Communities in a Time of (Dis)Connectedness" at the Community Center.

John Temple,  a Laurelhurst Community Club (LCC) member started (LEAP) to educate neighbors on learning how to prepare households in the case of a large earthquake, when it hits what to do, how to get help, how to help others and how to get the neighborhood ready.

Tonight's event features Daniel Abramson, a UW Associate Professor of Urban Design and Planning, who will discuss the practice of resilience and recovery after an earthquake or other significant event. 

Information sent out by LCC said:

Let's learn how to leverage our neighborhood assets. 

Professor Abramson and his colleagues at the University of Washington are working with Laurelhurst Earthquake Action Preparedness (LEAP) and other community resilience advocates in western Washington to leverage community assets for adaptive capacity in the face of disruptions (such as earthquakes) or other long-term changing conditions, in ways that also improve everyday community health and well-being.   

A key problem in this work is to understand how new technological, economic and cultural conditions are changing the meaning of local places and the ways in which communities are formed and stay connected. Prof. Abramson will present some of the theory, lessons and methods of working with disaster-stricken or threatened communities in such diverse places as mountainous Sichuan and Taiwan, urban Japan, and coastal Washington State.   

Professor Abramson will present some of the theory, lessons and methods of working with disaster-stricken or threatened communities in such diverse places as mountainous Sichuan and Taiwan, urban Japan, and coastal Washington State. A key problem in this work is to understand how new technological, economic and cultural conditions are changing the meaning of local places and the ways in which communities are formed and stay connected (or don’t).  

As we learn how to connect we will be stronger in the face of crime, building a stronger community. Police cannot do it on their own.  

There will be also be time to discuss the crime issue in Laurelhurst on a scale measured by community involvement.  

Dan Abramson has over 25 years' experience in community engagement and participatory planning and design. Since 2006, he has focused particularly on resilience, practicing and researching urban and rural community recovery from earthquakes and typhoons in Japan, China and Taiwan, and earthquake, tsunami and flooding preparedness and adaptation in Western Washington, from urban settings in Redmond and Everett, to tribal and other coastal places including Neah Bay (Makah), Taholah (Quinault), and Aberdeen.

For more information email to: LCCearthquake@Outlook.com.