The Call

The report Advancing Health and Community Resilience in the Gulf of Mexico Region: A Roadmap for Progress outlines actions that can reduce the impacts of disasters on communities. Among these actions is a call for building the capacity of communities to collaborate on issues that affect their health and resilience before, during, and after disasters. Specifically, the report calls for collaborations that

• are developed with communities,

• focus on specific priorities,

• support learning and engagement,

• integrate with existing community activities,

• build on the strengths within the communities, and

• bring in new resources (such as data and funding).

Lastly, the report encourages the use of innovative and potentially transformative approaches to capacity building.

The Initiative

The Adaptive Capacities for Transformation (ACT) Initiative leverages science, collaboration, and strategic investments to promote community health and resilience in disaster adaptation. The goal of ACT is to build the capacity of local stakeholders—across residents, groups, organizations, and institutions—to better collaborate on adapting to disasters that impact the health and resilience of their communities. To achieve this goal, ACT is engaging with Gulf communities in the planning, implementation, evaluation, and sustainability of solutions that advance a shared vision of disaster adaptation.

Phase 1: Planning

Launched in 2025, ACT worked with communities in?Houston, TX,?New Orleans, LA, and?Mobile, AL?to co-create a shared vision of disaster adaptation. In each location, GRP used transformative sciences to engage local stakeholders in developing an evidence-based and community-driven framework of What Communities Need to Deal with Disasters that affect their health and resilience. The resulting framework is a consensus of priorities from stakeholders, the research literature, local plans, and GRP: it illustrates how stakeholders believe the priorities relate to one another and work together to help their communities deal with disasters. GRP used this framework to design a funding opportunity for the co-planning of solutions that advance priorities rated highly important to stakeholders and highly aligned with its strategic plan and funding portfolio.

GRP is supporting 15 collaborations of stakeholders with ACT Planning Grants.

Lessons learned from Phase 1 are being used by the GRP and its partners to inform future investments that can support health, resilience, and disaster adaptation in Gulf communities and beyond.

Phase 2: Implementation

To be developed with participants.

Phase 3: Evaluation

To be developed with participants.

Phase 4: Sustainability

To be developed with participants.

ACT is funded by the GRP with additional support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.