Designed in response to the pace and scale of challenges to already-under-resourced communities, the California Resilience Implementation Accelerator catalyzes implementation of high impact, multi-benefit projects and initiatives that benefit historically marginalized and climate-vulnerable California communities,
Emerging from CRP’s work in four regions—greater Los Angeles, greater San Diego, greater Sacramento, and the Central Coast—the Accelerator has begun expanding to other regions statewide, supporting local nonprofit and government partners to advance project development via resources, technical assistance, global best practices, and collaborative knowledge exchange.
The Resilience Implementation Accelerator now acts as the connective tissue for initiatives led by core partners California Forward, Climate Resolve, and Resilient Cities Catalyst.
Core Activities
Support coalitions of regional resilience partners and practitioners to maintain a project pipeline to sustain momentum and surface urgent prioritized resilience needs and opportunities for action at the regional and state level.
Provide tailored project support, including technical assistance and resources, to advance implementation, maximize resilience benefits, incorporate community leadership, and ensure long-term funding and financing mechanisms.
Coalesce and inform funders around coordinated strategy, including philanthropy and other funding/financing entities, to channel investments towards the most opportune and high-impact projects.
Drive California's global leadership at the vanguard of adaptation and resilience that allows for testing and innovation, serving as a hub for resilience knowledge exchange and project scaling/replication across the state and beyond.
Approach & Initiatives
Resourcing Regional Initiatives & Project Acceleration
Working in regions across the state, Regional Initiatives & Project Acceleration are designed to bring together partnerships among local and regional governments, community-based organizations, tribal governments and communities, private sector partners, and community foundations/funders. These initiatives will adopt a multi-risk approach to provide adaptation benefits across all regionally-relevant climate impacts. Furthermore, each initiative will be anchored to a regional scale resilience framework, which is a plan or strategy outlining a community-supported vision for coordinated actions against prioritized shocks and stresses. For regions that do not yet have an existing framework, the Accelerator will provide support for the development of such a plan through a tested process that combines analytical assessment of resilience needs and opportunities with community engagement.
Advancing Cross-Cutting, Statewide Initiatives
Cross-Cutting Statewide Initiatives will work to improve statewide policy and practice that result in implementation challenges identified through place-based initiatives. Developing funding and financing frameworks to ensure sustained resource mobilization, identifying mechanisms for implementing a streamlined, comprehensive monitoring and evaluation program to rigorously assess impact and develop common standards for resilience investment, improve communications and engagement efforts, which involve innovative outreach to communities, synthesizing statewide impacts for partners and funders, and identify state and/or local policy initiatives and recommendations to better support local implementation.
Strengthening the Philanthropic Ecosystem
The Accelerator will coalesce and build relationships across funders, including philanthropy and other public/private funding and financing entities, to define a coordinated strategy that will better channel investments towards high-impact resilience projects. By uniting and educating funder organizations, the Accelerator will leverage the recent momentum for collaborative philanthropy and innovative blended finance models to maximize resilience investments and better articulate their returns. In addition, Accelerator programs have already begun to surface universal barriers to implementation, creating additional opportunities for the program team to identify avenues and mechanisms that will create a more enabling statewide policy and regulatory environment statewide.
Elevate California’s Leadership Globally
All of these avenues demonstrate California’s Global leadership at the vanguard of adaptation and resilience in a way that has broad international influence, using lessons that are informed by robust evaluation, testing, and iteration, such that the Accelerator ultimately serves as a hub for resilience knowledge exchange and best practices across the state and beyond.
