 My name is Justin Kozak. I am a researcher and policy analyst at the Center for Planning Excellence. We're a non-profit planning organization in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We work at all scales in the state, from the very hyper-local level to the state level. So we can bring a pretty broad perspective to planning work. To find resilience. Well, resilience means a lot of things to a lot of people. It's more than just risk reduction. It's more than, you know, putting up walls and preventing flooding. It's, you know, it's adapting to a changing demographic. It's adapting to, you know, increased healthcare needs. Making sure your community has, you know, can bounce back economically after an event or long term as we're dealing with, you know, Louisiana land loss and population movement. Well, LA SAFE came from the National Disaster Resilience Competition. It was awarded to the state of Louisiana. It was run by the Office of Community Development in partnership with Foundation for Louisiana. CPEX's role was to, we were the lead outreach and engagement team for two of the parishes, two of the six parishes involved in the plan. And then we were also played a lead role in drafting all six of the adaptation plans for the six parishes involved. You know, you have, you know, in Louisiana we have the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. And so this was, like, was part of the foundation for the success for LA SAFE and that we had great data, we had great modeling in which we could bring down to the local level. People then saw that data and they recognized it in their day-to-day lives or in, you know, the past flood event. And then they were able to, you know, we all, it set that foundation for which we could build these adaptation plans on. This planning process was different because a lot of planning processes happen without funding to implement some projects at the end of it. It also, a lot of times the complaint is that the plan comes to the community for them to comment on as opposed to being built by the community. And LA SAFE had the built-in flexibility and, you know, the ability to work from the top down and from the bottom up and really brought it together to have this federally funded project. But that also was based on, you know, the needs of the community. Built into the LA SAFE plan or the process was flexibility and how to use that spending. You know, resilience has a lot of definitions and, you know, the projects that came out of this plan covered everything from mental health to economic development to risk mitigation. How can it serve as a model? Well, it can serve as a model because, you know, you need good data and modeling to kind of look to the future. You need that data and modeling to be able to give you multiple time stamps so that people can prioritize adaptation actions over time. You need that, you know, you need that model and to work at the community level to have that vision. You also need the flexibility and how you can spend that funding. And then you need some leadership. You need some people to step in and have that hard conversation and start that conversation so that people can start asking questions and, you know, you can start figuring out some strategies for the long term. Federal policies that support our work. Well, this was funded through HUD, the National Disaster Resilience Competition. Louisiana is no stranger to disasters. So there's a lot of FEMA dollars and a lot of HUD dollars that go into it. We see the increasing importance and benefit of pre-disaster mitigation. And so as a planning organization, we really try and work that into everything that we do. And so that shift in funding in that direction helps us in the sense that it allows us to access more funding to help communities plan for the long term as opposed to just always recovering from a disaster. You know, the goal is to allow places to plan across disasters so that when they do happen, you kind of have something in place and know, you know, here's an opportunity to do something that's going to buy down our risk over time and increase our resilience.