Summary
The Hub’s practitioner partners are decision-makers responsible for putting CHEER research into action. This meeting cultivated relationships between both parties and set the foundation for how they will continue to collaborate.
On August 16th, A.R. Siders, CHEER’s practitioner engagement director, hosted the Hub’s first semi-annual practitioner engagement workshop.
The goal of this virtual meeting was to begin establishing the Hub’s standing practitioners partners group – a dozen government, non-government, and private sector practitioners who will help identify relevant research questions and provide advice on CHEER projects.
“The goal of CHEER is really to help practitioners and communities make informed decisions about risk, development, and disasters,” Siders said. “We can do that best if we include practitioners and communities right from the start.”
One of the first tasks for the group is to understand what the CHEER team can do. The first meeting focused on the Stakeholder-based Tool for the Analysis of Regional Risk (STARR), a collaborative computational tool that will support policy design by modeling different scenarios, objectives, and constraints related to coastal hazards. Partners had the opportunity to ask for details about STARR works and to brainstorm how it could be modified in the future to meet partner needs or to enable collaboration.
Unlike earlier approaches, STARR is dynamic and integrates decades of research on how households, governments, and insurance companies make decisions. The information generated from this tool will be used to predict how these actors will respond to changing coastal hazards and to changes in government policies. At the same time, the tool will evolve as researchers add layers of complexity, nuance, and trade-offs.
The diversity of CHEER’s practice partners is one of its greatest assets. Their unique insight into how decisions at their level will help vet and improve how well STARR models relevant decisions and their outcomes.
In the next steps, individual partners will work with CHEER thrusts on specific projects, and some partners will attend the CHEER Community Partners meeting this fall to build connections between practitioner and community partners. All partners will be invited to the in-person meeting in Spring 2025 to continue building our network.
For information about CHEER’s practitioners partners and STARR, visit the Hub’s Partners page and/or view the STARR Fact Sheet.
