Cedar Rapids/Linn County was a Resilience America pilot community from 2014 to 2018. Linn County faces a variety of natural and manmade hazards including riverine and flash flooding, tornadoes, drought, infrastructure failure, and hazardous material incidents. While all present unique challenges, flooding has been particularly devastating. In 2008, Cedar Rapids experienced the most destructive flood in its history. This flood, a Presidentially Declared Disaster, impacted 85 counties in Iowa. Over 12 inches of rain fell across portions of the Midwest from June 1-15, 2008, exacerbating already saturated soil from a historically wet period in Iowa from January to June. The Cedar River, which runs directly through the center of Cedar Rapids, crested at almost 32 feet, resulting in overtopped levees and major damage to homes and businesses. Since the catastrophic floods in 2008, Cedar Rapids/Linn County has made significant progress toward recovery, has come back stronger, and is continuing its efforts to become more prepared and build resilience to future flood events and other hazards.

Resilient America partnered with Cedar Rapids/Linn County to explore a variety of resilience priorities such as:

• Understand and build on current community strengths
• Engage diverse voices in resilience building efforts
• Build resilience within vulnerable populations
• Effectively communicate risk to the public
• Build trust within the community
• Build multi-stakeholder, multi-generational partnerships
• Develop real-time decision making capability during a disaster

Timeline of ResilientAmerica activities with the Cedar Rapids/Linn County pilot community:

• September 2014: Kickoff Meeting
• March 2015: Meeting with Cedar Rapids/Linn County stakeholders to discuss goals, a strategic direction, and community priorities, and create a local ground team of primary partners.
• April 2015: Resilient America organized and facilitated a Community Resilience Workshop with local stakeholders.
• April 2015: Resilient America facilitated the role-playing Extreme Events game in Cedar Rapids.
• December 2015: Meeting with the Linn County ground team about implementing the Zurich Flood Resilience Measurement Framework in the community.
• March 2016: Meeting with the Linn County ground to plan the implementation of the Zurich Flood Resilience Measurement Framework.
• June 2016: Resilient America implemented the Zurich Flood Resilience Measurement Framework to measure Linn County's baseline flood resilience and collected data from stakeholders with expertise in public health, disaster preparedness/response, and the natural environment.
• August 2016: Resilient America continued the data collection effort and collected data from stakeholders from the business and academic communities and from local community groups.
• September 2016: Resilient America continued the data collection effort and collected data from stakeholders from the nonprofit community and community groups.
• September 2016: The Resilient America Roundtable held its biannual meeting in Cedar Rapids and met with the Linn County ground team.
• February 2017: Meeting with members of the Linn County ground team to review the data collected using the Zurich Flood Resilience Measurement Framework to grade the level of resilience for each flood resilience indicator in order to establish Linn County's baseline flood resilience.
• March 2017: Meeting with the Linn County ground team to review the results of the baseline flood resilience assessment including the common themes that emerged from the assessment, the community's successes and challenges related to flood resilience, and potential opportunities and solutions for building or enhancing flood resilience in the community.
• July 2017: Resilient America hosted a webinar, “Measuring Resilience for Disaster Specific Hazards,” by Dr. (Paul) Sambanis, Adjunct Associate Professor, Director of Curriculum Emergency Management and Continuity Planning, University of Illinois at Chicago, for the Linn County ground team.
• July 2017: Resilient America hosted an NGO Disaster Preparedness Training led by SF Card (San Francisco Community Agencies Responding to Disaster) as well as facilitated a discussion between representatives from the federal interagency group, the Mitigation Framework Leadership Group (MitFLG), and Linn County/Cedar Rapids community stakeholders about how communities are investing in and making decisions related to mitigation and disaster risk reduction.
• October 2017: Resilient America implemented the Zurich Flood Resilience Measurement framework in Linn County to better understand the community's preparedness for, response to, and recovery from the October 2016 flood. ResilientAmerica met with experts from the nonprofit community, academia, and the private sector, and met with stakeholders with expertise in the natural environment.
• December 2017: Resilient America continued the data collection effort and met with stakeholders from the nonprofit community, local government, and public health, and met with community groups.
• February 5-8, 2018: Meeting with members of the Linn County ground team to review the data collected in October and December 2017 using the Zurich Flood Resilience Measurement Framework to grade the level of resilience for each flood resilience indicator.
• June 19, 2018: Resilient America hosted the symposium, "Moving Forward: Pathways to Building Community Resilience," in Cedar Rapids.

Resilient America conducted meetings and activities in Cedar Rapids and Linn County to enhance the resilience of the community, identify and prioritize resilience needs, and support preparedness efforts. A major thrust of the partnership focused on building resilience to floods through the implementation of a flood resilience baseline study.