Prince George residents can reflect back on the wildfires of 2017 when more than 10,000 evacuees took refuge here and be very proud of how the community rose to that challenge.
Around the province recently, not only were there fires, but floods that cut the top half of the province off from the bottom half when roads were washed away and the recent snow storms throughout the province presented great challenges to those who weren't used to all the extreme weather.
So how resilient are rural communities when put to the test?
Claire Styffe, research coordinator with the Rural Community Resilience Project out of the Centre for Rural Health Research at UBC, wants to know and is asking people to help by completing a survey.
At first, research was focused on how rural communities were doing during the pandemic but as time passed and community consultations were conducted the research team realized that not only were the communities responding well to COVID-19 but so much more, Styffe added.
"We were doing this at the same time as the wildfires were going on and then the floods came so we started looking at all those factors, too and we pivoted a little bit to look at rural resilience in a more general scope," Styffe said. "And in every community disruptions included different things."
So they did some ground research and some academic research to figure out what could be associated with community resilience and then put together an advisory committee to find out what members of a community felt was important to look at and include in the survey.
Researchers built the survey with their input because there is no replacement for on-the-ground voices, Styffe said.
"So working with the committee and our background research we came up with a few things that we wanted to investigate just a little further to see if they're associated with resilience," she added.
The survey asks what people think about their community, if it can bounce back from tough times, is it a good place to live, and other baseline questions like that.
"Then we ask specific questions about their perceptions about their community on different themes, including things like emergency preparedness, trust in leadership, adequate healthcare resources but then there were other things that were included specifically as a result of the conversations with rural community members, so housing was a big one," Styffe said.
Having a sustainable community means having adequate housing available for all, she noted.
In the survey it asks people if they believed there was enough affordable housing, view housing as an investment, or just a place to live, and included a reconciliation part as a request of the advisory committee because that was something they have been hugely affected by and that it's something rural BC really has to come to terms with, Styffe noted.
"Is that associated with resilience?" Styffe asked. "Do people feel that this could be helpful to their community? Could strengthen their community? And these are some of the things we could be looking at.
The research group has done a small launch of the survey and are now looking to do a wider launch and that's where area residents come in.
Getting more data and doing in depth analyses on what actually is associated with resilience can demonstrate what characteristics of a community come into play when it comes to resiliency.
"And hopefully that way we can better understand what resiliency looks like in BC so we can perhaps come up with policy recommendations and say ok, people in particularly resilient communities feel that X, Y and Z are happening, whereas people who are in communities that they don't feel are resilient notice these concepts are missing and how can we try and make sure people have access to those things."
To be part of this research click on the survey link until Feb. 27.
The study is funded by the SPOR BC SUPPORT Unit and the principal investigator is Dr. Jude Kornelsen.
