Title
Building a Resilient Windham: Reviewing Windham’s Vulnerability Assessment and breaking down community resilience measures in Windham, presented by Kelly Rehberg (GPCOG) and Camille Beaulieu (AmeriCorps Municipal Resilience Fellow).
Vulnerability Assessment
An overview of the process and results from the recently completed Vulnerability Assessment. This assessment looked at climate hazards and impacts facing Windham, resources at-risk, and potential actions the town can take to address those risks. The goal of the assessment was to help the town understand how climate change will impact the community and future steps the town can take to build resilience.
Community Resilience Abstract:
This presentation covers community resilience in Windham, Maine-the capacity to prepare for, respond to, recover from, and adapt to challenges-emphasizing that both physical infrastructure (roads, energy, water systems) and social infrastructure (community support, social connection) are essential, particularly given how hazards create cascading impacts that disproportionately burden vulnerable residents and municipal systems. It situates this work within Maine's 2025 Growth Management Law amendments, which now require resilience and sustainability to be integrated throughout comprehensive plans rather than treated as standalone sections.
The presentation highlights Windham's existing resilience efforts-green space, emergency preparedness, the library as a community hub, Age-Friendly Windham, and various long-term planning documents-alongside the contributions of the AmeriCorps fellow serving with Windham. It closes with a call to action: incorporating resilience into Windham's Comprehensive Plan, prioritizing at-risk infrastructure, pursuing funding, and strengthening both physical infrastructure and social networks.