It's time to get started here.

Good morning, and thank you for being here.

I'm Twila Carter, the chair for the Resilience Committee, and uh our uh vice chair is not here today.

That would be Abby Kamen.

Um, but we do have a representative from her office.

Today's presentation is going to be by Taylor Landon with the uh Greater Houston Partnership.

I'd like to uh welcome those in attendance.

We've got council member Martinez, staff from Castillo, Alcorn, Pollard, my office, uh Peck, uh Ramirez.

No, you're Thomas, Thomas, and of course, Cayman.

Um thank you all for being here today.

We've got a couple of uh representatives online staff from Cassex, Martha Castax Tatum, Mayor Pro Tem's office as well.

Um Taylor, come on down.

We're really looking forward to your presentation.

Uh, when we met a month or so ago, I I thought it was most uh appropriate to bring the work that you are all are doing over at the GHP uh to the city because I think we are parallel on many things.

You sure you don't want to chair?

Say it again.

You sure you don't want to chair?

I'm good, I'm good.

Okay.

We'll do this.

All right.

So that'll work.

Wow, that's tall.

All right.

Um well, I really appreciate the invitation to present to the committee today.

We we are um engaged in this resilience work, and we're we're actually proud of progress that we've we've made.

Um so what I'm gonna do, I just have a few slides today, and my hope is that we can have a discussion, um, solicit some feedback from you all to continue to enhance this work.

Um where I'm gonna start is just a little bit of context of how we uh decided, made the decision to focus on this work stream, and then I'll walk through um kind of how we're defining the work and and um and then go through a couple of um of early indications of success.

So um let me give again a little bit of context.

Um when Steve Kane became president CEO of the partnership a couple of years ago, we started having uh discussions with members of our board about the the what are the topics in inside of the the business community and the leading institutions in Houston uh that are most prevalent in the boardroom of their organizations.

And what we heard consistently was was two themes.

One was around talent and workforce development, and the partnership's been engaged in that work through our upscale Houston initiative for for going on a decade now.

And then the other thing that we heard very, very consistently was this issue of resilience.

Now, I will say that this was coming after Hurricane Barrel that was a real shock to the region.

And um, and so I'm I'm certain that that influenced a lot of those discussions, but it's no less relevant um today than it was right after Hurricane Barrel.

And so this this issue of resilience and and the impact that it has on Houston's economy, quality of life, all of the things that make Houston a really attractive place to live work and play, are um uh uh encompassed in having a resilient city and region.

And so we took that and we um we attached a very uh high aspirational bar to um to this work.

And if you click to the to the next slide, um you'll see here that we have set out to make Houston the most resilient coastal city in the world.

It's quite an ambitious statement, but um we think that that that is important to put an aspiration out and um and work toward it.

So um the other thing that I think is really, really important as you look at this slide.

We are are defining so resilience means a lot of things to a lot of people.

Everybody has their own definition of what that means.

And so we we really thought long and hard about what how are we as the partnership going to define resilience?

And we landed on this issue, this notion of critical systems.

So why did what what does that mean?

That means that we are are uh directly focused on strengthening the critical systems that make life normal and result in in a high quality of life and an attractive place to live and work.

And um so what we mean by those systems, as you can see here on the page is uh flood mitigation, health care, transportation, the the the power systems, uh telecommunications and and water.

So why do we land on those?

The the reason why we we uh focused in on the critical systems was that all of those system owners are individuals that are that are on our board that that have prominent leadership roles inside of our organization.

So we felt like that we could um leverage their engagement at the partnership to not only identify where the gaps existed between these critical systems and and work toward uh addressing those gaps, but then also uh uh strengthen the interdependencies between these systems.

Because what we found is that on their own, a lot of these systems are very strong, very resilient.

And um, but but we have also uncovered uh a number of places where we can strengthen some of those interdependencies because if one system goes down, it has anevitable impact on another.

So um that is it's an important frame for us all to understand um that that we're looking at this from a systems lens.

Um we also the uh last point there is that the critical system lens is is again intentional on our part, in part because we wanted to be sure not to duplicate some of the exceptional work that's happening in other parts of the community that are addressing what I'll refer to as individual resilience.

So think about the work that United Way is doing um to address the Alice population, their integrated client journey, all of that work is is directed at the individual level.

And we want that to continue.

You you think about the work at Baker Ripley and the dozens and dozens and dozens of nonprofits that are doing excellent work in their local um very, very local community.

Um and and the last thing we wanted to do at the partnership was duplicate any of that uh exceptional work that's happening.

So we felt that our um our our the most appropriate role for us was to focus on these critical systems.

Um so how are we going about doing this work?