Becoming resilient: Community-driven change and the civic capacity index

One of the principal features of successful community governance is that it is collaborative and thus dependent on a community's ability to work together. However, there are no valid, comprehensive means to assess a community's capacity to respond to civic challenges in collaborative ways, and that are predictive of community resilience and well-being. In this study, we describe the conceptual foundations of the Civic Capacity Index (CCI) and the multiple methods used to validate it. Findings from a large statewide sample show the CCI's scales to have high internal reliabilities and conform to a bifactor model, using confirmatory factor analysis. As hypothesized, CCI scores are predictive of multiple measures of community processes that in theory should be related to civic capacity; e.g., trust in governance, social control and cohesion, and community connectedness; public health indicators such as child abuse and suicide rates; and especially community resilience and well-being, even a year after baseline. The empirical findings align with the conceptual basis of the CCI, in particular, the association between a community's civic capacity and resilience. This tight-knit relationship has profound implications for promoting community resilience by building civic capacity.