The Santa Barbara County Regional Climate Collaborative is calling on local agencies and organizations to apply for funding and support to develop community resilience hubs.
A resilience hub is a community-serving facility that can coordinate emergency resource distribution and provide services, like food, water or clean air rooms before, during and/or after a natural hazard event.
The collaborative is looking to develop resilience hubs in three Santa Barbara County locations. Two of the hubs will be in the North County region (Santa Ynez Valley, Lompoc Valley, Santa Maria Valley and/or Cuyama Valley), and the third will be on the South Coast, between Gaviota and Carpinteria.
“Resilience hubs are a community-generated idea that emerged from our Resilience Roundtables held back in 2019-2020 and are now in Community Environmental Council’s Resilience Action Plan,” said Michael Chiacos, climate policy director of Community Environmental Council and steering committee member of the collaborative.
“It’s great that we can start to turn these concepts into reality through the collaborative,” he said.
Eligible applicants may include any organization that owns and/or operates a facility within Santa Barbara County and has authority to make capital improvements or operational changes. The collaborative will be hosting an informational webinar for interested applicants, 2 p.m. Tuesday July 26.
Deadline to submit an application is Sept. 7. To learn more, register for the webinar and to apply, visit the Resources section, www.countyofsb.org/collaborative.
Selected sites and organizations will receive a technical site audit and recommendations to implement energy resilience improvements, support from a local community-based organization to engage the public, support from the county to develop a governance framework for the future hub, and $15,000 as an incentive for participation.
Funding for the program comes from the county of Santa Barbara thanks to a $200,000 grant from the California Resilience Challenge and a $25,000 grant from PG&E.
“Santa Barbara County will continue to experience natural hazards such as flooding, wildfires and smoke, extreme heat and power outages,” said Alelia Parenteau, interim director of the Sustainability & Resilience Department of City of Santa Barbara and steering committee chair of the collaborative.
“Resilience hubs can help communities prepare, adapt and rebound from events such as these, while continuing to provide vital services every day.”
The collaborative is a growing multi-sector network of organizations working together to advance climate mitigation and resiliency efforts in Santa Barbara County. The collaborative advances regional scale climate solutions through coordination and partnership.
Santa Barbara County is a member and provides fiscal and administrative support to the collaborative. For more, visit www.countyofsb.org/collaborative. For about Santa Barbara County government, visit www.CountyofSB.org.