Who We Are and What We Do
Working with communities to advance their resilience.
ANCR™, founded by the International Code Council, U.S. Resiliency Council and the Meridian Institute, is a 501(c)(3) national coalition of public and private sector stakeholders working to advance community resilience. ANCR’s primary objective is the development of a system of community benchmarks—the first system of its kind in the United States—that will allow local leaders to easily assess and improve their resilience across all functions of a community.
ANCR is a member of the International Code Council family of solutions. The Code Council is a nonprofit association that provides a wide range of building safety solutions including product evaluation, accreditation, certification, codification and training. It develops model codes and standards used worldwide to construct safe, sustainable, affordable and resilient structures.
As demonstrated by the National Institute of Building Sciences, investments in hazard mitigation can provide a benefit between $4 and $11 for every $1 invested. ANCR will provide communities with the tools and metrics to help realize these returns through more resilient communities. ANCR is committed to giving communities a voluntary, transparent, usable and easily understandable assessment tool, Community Resilience Benchmarks® (CRB™), that helps to showcase their whole community resilience and to provide a simple gauge of how their resilience continues to strengthen.
Community resilience relies on engagement of representatives from across the community. ANCR and its CRBs assists communities in facilitating dialogues across their constituents to communicate their current risks and identify community priorities for improvement. Communities that go through the benchmarking process are provided with a framework for improvement in a format easily disseminated to their residents and other stakeholders who will contribute to the success of its implementation.
Each component of the CRB covers key issues relevant to a given functional area through a set of tiered requirements moving from Essential to Enhanced and Exceptional. The Benchmark content is developed through the engagement of subject matter experts who identify steps communities can take to achieve each level of resilience.
ANCR™ Guiding Principles
Address the Whole Community
A community is only as resilient as its least resilient function. Community resilience depends on the resilience of every segment of the community collectively and individually.
Communities are Unique
A community’s resilience must be evaluated and strategies implemented in the context of its unique risk profile, which should include all of the significant risks the community faces.
Tools Must be Usable, Useful and Used
Community Resilience Benchmarks should be useful for any American community.
Benchmarks Inform Multiple Stakeholders
Community Resilience Benchmarks should be useful to both the community itself and to those outside the community.