Current Projects

Development of a model of community functioning during disasters: The CoPE-WELL model

Project Description

Background: Practitioners and policymakers currently do not have a systematic way of assessing:

• The current state of disaster resilience at the local level
• The factors that contribute most to a resilient community
• Levels of resilience among communities around the country

Purpose: Provide practitioners and policymakers with a tool to help:

• Predict how much community functioning might be affected by a disaster, and the time it might take for community functioning to rebound to pre-disaster levels
• Explore the potential effects of various pre-, peri-, and post-event interventions on community resilience, in a given community
• Support and spark cross-sector dialogue leading to a greater understanding of what influences disaster resilience
• Engage communities in strengthening resilience together 

Approach: Group development of conceptual and systems dynamic computation models to predict the time course of community functioning following a disaster.  Other aspects of the projects include qualitative and quantitative validation efforts, in-depth stakeholder engagement, evaluation of measures, and development of specific use cases of the model. 

Goals:

• Establish a county-level model of  community functioning and disaster resilience
• Identify domains and subdomains that influence resilience
• Identify measures that provide reasonable representation of capabilities or capacity in given domains 
• Use a system dynamics approach to account for key interactions between domains over time
• Evaluate the accuracy and practical utility of the model
• Build a version of the model as a decision-support tool to assist planning

Meetings/Reports/Events: The CoPE-WELL team recently held a stakeholder engagement event to gain feedback from practitioners who may use the CoPE-WELL model in the future.  Additional engagement will continue with the presentation and discussion of the model at the Public Health Preparedness Summit.

JHSPH Center for Health Security: Tom Inglesby, PI, with project staff at the JHSPH Center for Health Security

Johns Hopkins University: Jon Links, Team Lead and PI, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH), and the JHSPH/JHU CoPE-WELL team

University of Delaware: Jim Kendra, PI, and the University of Delaware Disaster Research Center CoPE-WELL Team

US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): Eric Carbone, Director, Office of Applied Research and CoPE-WELL Program Manager  

Independent Contributors: Cathy Slemp and Bob Burhans

Supported By: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Johns Hopkins University

Resources: