According to Dr. Julia Haggerty, an instructor at Montana State University, there are certain key indicators present before a significant change that can determine the resilience of a community.

“Some of my early work was seeing how communities responded to changes that came out of working in energy boom towns,” Haggerty said during a recent webinar sponsored by the Ranchers Stewardship Alliance. “Getting a new industry or losing an industry really challenges community resilience.”

In the end, the research pulled from communities around the world has shown community resilience boils down to one thing: the ability to work together and a history of doing so.

“It’s like having two people with two horses,” Haggerty explained. “One set of people can work together, and another can’t. It’s not about horsepower, but the ability to get the horses working together effectively.”

Other assets like a positive outlook, a diverse economy, a relationship to place and functional governance increase the ability for people to work together during hardship. Haggerty outlined four key elements in communities that had survived disasters like fires, a loss of young people, and economic downtowns:

• Leadership

The community needs to have people who can lead, organize, and cooperate.

“We saw this during the oil boom in the Baaken that created new public health demands,” Haggerty said. “In that community, there were leaders who stepped outside of their assigned roles to create a network that could address the public need.”

• A history of working together

Communities need people who can work together in a systematic way that can be adapted to the situation.

“When a crisis occurs, that’s not the time to write the phone tree,” Haggerty noted. “It needs to already exist, and there have to be habits for solving problems.”

• Vision

The community needs to have a common, forward-looking set of values and beliefs.

“It’s about the ability to see a positive future and share that within the community,” Haggerty said.

• Networks

The community needs to have systems that promote the exchange of ideas and resources beyond local boundaries.

“A good example is when there are fires and droughts, and hay growers who have a shared culture come together to help bring resources from outside the area,” Haggerty noted.

Communities that already have these elements or assets within themselves have a high probability of exiting a negative event successfully.

“We know that if a community is starting from a depleted set of assets, they are more likely to go on a trajectory of having more depleted assets,” she said. “For those starting with assets like the ones listed, it becomes about conserving or enhancing assets and putting them to work.”