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Economic Resiliency in Practice

Using IEDC's 2025 State of the Field survey data, Jessica Paolini and David Gelfand highlight a striking disconnect: only 31.2% of U.S. practitioners report addressing climate resilience and disaster preparedness, and just 14.8% report measuring it.

This webinar will explore their IEDC Economic Development Journal article investigating why this gap exists and whether those numbers may actually underestimate the resiliency work economic developers are already doing.

Drawing on practitioner interviews, state economic development plans, national frameworks, and examples from across the country, we will help to move the discussion from "Are economic developers responsible for resilience?" toward more useful points about what resilience looks like in practice, who owns it, and how should we measure it.

Participants will examine questions such as:

- Are we already doing resilience work without recognizing it as such?
- How should economic development organizations define their role alongside planners, environmental agencies, emergency management, and other partners?
- What should we actually measure?
- What can practitioners learn from communities that are already putting economic resilience into practice?

The authors also offer concrete examples from Montana, Michigan, Vermont, South Carolina, and New Mexico, as well as measurement approaches and toolkits practitioners can adapt to their own communities.

Speakers:

- Jessica Paolini, Director of Economic Development, Somerset County, NJ
- David Gelfand, Economic Development Specialist, Somerset County, NJ

This virtual event is supported by IEDC's Economic Development Research Partners.
When
9/22/2026 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM