Design for Community Resilience: Participatory Civic Technology to Close the Last-Mile Disaster Relief Gap in Puerto Rico

Funded by the National Science Foundation, this project seeks to pilot a participatory civic technology initiative, re+connect, to close the last-mile disaster relief gap and create long-term resilience for under-served communities in Puerto Rico. Home to 3.2 million people, Puerto Rico is confronted with more frequent and more destructive disasters such as hurricanes and floods. The need to better prepare the Island for future disasters is immense and urgent. Building on collaborative research and design efforts from the past three years, this project aims to mobilize, inform, and coordinate collective action through a mobile application and engagement program across residents, community groups, and governmental and non-governmental entities in disaster management to direct the right responses, to the right places, at the right time.

Outside collaborators:

• Foundation for Puerto Rico Inc.
• Yiyuan Qin, re+collective, Inc.
• Robert Soden, Governing Council of the University of Toronto