An ad hoc committee will be appointed to plan and organize a series of workshops/meetings, as a set of activities in four urban areas, each of which brings broad and deep capacity for resilience to these new partnerships. Individual members of the Roundtable, other experts, and staff will assist local decision makers in each of these places to understand and communicate the risks in their community, establish resilience goals, ascertain ways to measure resilience and progress towards their goals, and share their resilience-building lessons with other communities. At the end of each partnership, an individually authored summary (Report to the Roundtable) will be written for each community, providing an overview of the community resilience projects and activities.

The Roundtable undertakes, as a part of its charge, resilience work in communities throughout the U.S., with a current focus on Linn County/Cedar Rapids, IA; Charleston, SC; and Seattle, WA; Tulsa, OK, is proposed as a fourth community. Each Resilient America community has a different arc for its resilience efforts, based on local risks and priorities. However, the elements that tie communities together in this work are the four recommendations from Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative (NRC, 2012):
1. Understand and communicate risk to better manage risks,
2. Measure resilience and progress toward resilience goals,
3. Build partnerships for building resilience within communities, and
4. Share information about resilience.

Specific resilience goals and activities will be determined by each community, and they will be implemented by the community. In general, the RAR role is to facilitate discussions to help communities better understand their baselines, goals, and priorities for building resilience, and bring expertise for stakeholders to share information on approaches, challenges, and innovations in implementing resilience at the local level. Meetings in Brief may be produced to summarize discussions that take place in the four communities, and these will be reviewed according to institutional guidelines. The time period for the partnership in each community is 24 months.