Community Resilience Centers in California: The Federal and State Funding Stack Quietly Reshaping Civic Architecture
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By Chunpang (Benson) Chen, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, CPHC, CPHD — Studio C Architecture
On May 29, 2026, California's Strategic Growth Council released a Notice of Funding Availability that most architects missed. The document announced $153.4 million available for community resilience centers across the state — the second round of a program that already received nearly five times its Round 1 funding in applications. A few weeks earlier, FEMA had opened $1 billion in federal grant money for exactly the same type of project.
The word "resilience hub" is everywhere now. But the concept is more specific than the language suggests, and the opportunity is larger than most people in the design field realize. This article explains where the idea came from, why California is betting serious money on it, and what the work actually requires from the architects and communities doing it.
What is a community resilience center?
A community resilience center, or resilience hub, is a community-serving facility designed to support residents and coordinate resources before, during, and after disruptive events — wildfires, extreme heat, flooding, grid outages, public health emergencies. The California Strategic Growth Council defines eligible centers as "neighborhood-scale facilities that provide shelter and resources during climate emergencies while supporting year-round community services."
That last part is the key. A building that only opens during disasters doesn't work. By the time smoke is visible on the horizon, people need to already know where to go, who runs the place, and whether the doors will be open. The year-round programming — food distribution, job training, health clinics, broadband access, youth activities — is what earns the community's trust before the emergency.
A brief history of the model
The idea that community buildings should serve dual functions isn't new. Settlement houses in late-19th-century Chicago and New York, most famously Jane Addams' Hull House (1889), operated as neighborhood anchors that provided services to immigrant communities during ordinary times and crisis alike. During World War II, community centers served as civil defense hubs.
What changed in recent decades is the scale and frequency of the disasters, and the recognition that formal emergency response systems fail the most vulnerable communities first.
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 made this undeniable. The official response was slow, centralized, and inadequate for communities that lacked resources to evacuate.
Community organizations — churches, neighborhood associations, mutual aid networks — filled gaps the government couldn't. Sandy in 2012 reinforced the lesson in a different geography with a different threat.
In California, the 2018 Carr Fire in Shasta County was a turning point. The fire burned into Redding with almost no warning, destroying 1,500 structures and killing eight people. It illustrated how quickly conventional emergency infrastructure can be overwhelmed — and how quickly the communities that survive do so because of neighborhood-level organization, not centralized response.
The Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN) formalized the resilience hub model around 2017, defining it as a facility that works "at the nexus of community resilience, emergency management, climate change mitigation, and social equity." That framing helped translate the idea into a program structure that funders could work with.
Then COVID-19 arrived in 2020. Almost overnight, existing community facilities became essential infrastructure for vaccine distribution, food access, internet access for remote schooling, and mental health support. Many of them failed the test because they lacked backup power, adequate ventilation, or the physical capacity for the new demands. The pandemic made the resilience hub concept legible to a much wider audience.
California's legislature codified the program with AB 211 in 2022. The California CRC program launched its first grant round in 2023.
The five forces driving demand
Climate change and wildfire. NorCal is experiencing longer fire seasons, more severe PSPS events, and more frequent "spare the air" days when outdoor air quality is hazardous. In 2020 and 2021, wildfire smoke blanketed California for weeks at a time. Communities without clean-air facilities had nowhere to go.
Equity and environmental justice. The communities least able to self-evacuate or recover privately are disproportionately low-income and communities of color. The West Oakland neighborhood where the West Oakland Resiliency Hub is being developed is 76% people of color with a median household income of $38,169 and sits adjacent to a rail yard and freeway corridors with chronic air quality problems. When the Oakland Fire Department states publicly that response may take up to a week after a major disaster, that's not an abstract risk in West Oakland.
Energy security. California's investor-owned utilities have implemented Public Safety Power Shutoffs covering millions of customers over the past several years. A community center without backup power can't serve as a shelter during the events it's supposed to address.
COVID-19 lessons. The pandemic revealed a massive gap in community health infrastructure. Facilities that could have served as vaccination sites, food banks, or quarantine support often couldn't because they lacked the capacity, ventilation, or backup systems to operate reliably.
Federal and state policy alignment. FEMA's BRIC program, the Inflation Reduction Act's environmental justice provisions, and California's CRC program are now funding the same type of project from different angles. The overlap creates a genuine multi-source funding stack that didn't exist five years ago.
The funding stack in 2026
The current funding environment for resilience hub projects in California draws from several sources simultaneously:
California Strategic Growth Council — CRC Program (Round 2): $153.4 million NOFA released May 29, 2026. Planning grants range from $100,000 to $500,000. Implementation grants from $1 million to $10 million. Eligible applicants include local governments, tribal entities, nonprofits, and their partnerships. Projects must serve disadvantaged communities (CalEnviroScreen-designated areas prioritized) and remain operational as a community resilience center for at least 15 years.
FEMA BRIC (FY24-25): $1 billion federal program opened March 2026. Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities funds infrastructure investments that reduce disaster risk before a disaster occurs. Resilience hubs that incorporate backup power and community shelter functions qualify.
IRA Environmental Justice: $60 million earmarked through various EPA and DOE programs for environmental justice communities, directly applicable to resilience hub projects in CalEnviroScreen-high-scoring census tracts.
HUD CDBG-DR: Community Development Block Grant - Disaster Recovery funds flowing to California counties affected by declared disasters can fund resilience infrastructure as part of recovery planning.
USDA Rural Development: Community Facilities programs fund construction and renovation of essential community facilities in rural areas, with income thresholds that often align with CRC eligibility.
Round 1 of the California CRC program generated 189 applications requesting over $700 million against $98.6 million available — nearly five times oversubscribed. The state funded 24 projects ranging from a $291,000 planning grant to Redding's Day Resource Center to $10 million implementation grants for projects in Richmond, Los Angeles, Coachella, and Nevada County. The oversubscription shows how much unmet demand exists, and why Round 2 matters.
Case studies: what the work looks like on the ground
West Oakland Resiliency Hub — Oakland, CA
The West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WOEIP) is adapting three existing civic sites — the West Oakland Senior Center, the West Oakland branch of the Oakland Public Library, and DeFremery Recreation Center and Park — into a full resiliency hub. All three sites are owned by the City of Oakland.
The hub will connect to existing neighborhood networks: churches, schools, parks, community organizations, and emergency responders. Proposed infrastructure includes renewable backup power, air filtration for wildfire smoke days, communications systems independent of cell and WiFi, emergency shelter capacity, EV charging, and ADA-accessible transportation. On a typical day, the same spaces host education programs, tool libraries, community meetings, and health services.
The feasibility phase in 2020 was completed in partnership with urban design students from UC Berkeley and technical consultants assessing solar, HVAC, and structural needs. Oakland's Equity and Climate Action Plan has committed to replicating the model at three additional sites.
Pogo Park / Harbour Hall — Richmond, CA
Pogo Park received a $10 million SGC CRC implementation grant to construct Harbour Hall in Richmond's Iron Triangle neighborhood, a historically disinvested community with high industrial pollution. This is a community-planned and community-managed project. The design includes solar and battery storage, a commercial kitchen, bioretention planters for stormwater, CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) training capacity, and workforce development programming. The Iron Triangle connection is not incidental — Pogo Park has been operating in the neighborhood for years and has the community relationships that make a resilience hub function.
Greenville, CA — The Spot
SERA Design's resilience planners worked with the town of Greenville after the 2021 Dixie Fire destroyed most of it. What they found was instructive: the community had organically built "The Spot," a collection of modular structures at the center of town that started with a food cart and grew into a gathering place for community support, pop-up services, and recovery resources. It looked almost exactly like what SERA's design team had been developing as a resilience hub model. The community built it from necessity, faster than any formal design process would have allowed. SERA is now helping Greenville formalize and expand what it created.
RYSE Center — Richmond, CA
RYSE is a youth-centered community organization in Richmond that has installed solar with battery backup in partnership with the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN). The center hosts resilience-based programming and serves as a model for youth-led resilience infrastructure. PSE Healthy Energy identified it as an example of what a solar-plus-storage resilience hub looks like when it's community-designed from the start.
County of Nevada — Veterans' Halls
The County of Nevada received a $10 million SGC implementation grant to renovate two historic Veterans' Halls in rural western Nevada County. The project addresses seismic upgrades, ADA compliance, energy-efficient HVAC, commercial kitchen renovation, and winter access (snowplows were part of the budget). In rural areas, where distances to any facility are significant, these existing civic buildings are often the only viable resilience hub sites. Their renovation is both preservation and infrastructure.
City of Redding — Day Resource Center
Relevant to this article's origin: the City of Redding received a Round 1 planning grant of $291,863 to plan the Redding Day Resource Center. Redding has an extreme heat profile (routinely over 110°F in summer), a wildfire exposure that Carr Fire demonstrated viscerally, and a significant unsheltered population without access to cooling or services during the day. The center will provide year-round cooling and heating, broadband, showers, laundry, and trauma-informed case management, with increased capacity during emergencies. It is the kind of project that shows how resilience hub infrastructure and basic social services are the same thing.
The building envelope is the resilience strategy
Most discussions of resilience hubs focus on solar panels, battery storage, and backup generators. Those matter. But they don't function at full potential without an envelope that holds.
A conventional community center built to minimum California energy code loses its interior comfort within hours of losing power in summer or winter. Without mechanical systems, it becomes unsuitable for shelter quickly. During a wildfire smoke event, a leaky building is a smoke delivery system.
A building designed to Passive House standards holds its interior temperature for 48 to 72 hours without mechanical systems — sometimes longer, depending on occupancy and mass. It achieves very low air infiltration rates (under 0.6 ACH50), which means smoke and particulates stay outside. With MERV-13 or HEPA filtration added to an already-tight envelope, the building becomes a genuine clean-air refuge during wildfire smoke events.
Layer solar and battery storage over that envelope, sized correctly to the load, and the building operates at full function during a PSPS or grid outage: lighting, refrigeration for food and medication, communications equipment, and climate control all stay on.
The Ceres Community Project's implementation grant from Round 1 ($4.8 million in Santa Rosa) was awarded partly because the design integrated an "advanced microgrid system that is solar powered with a battery backup system and a generator" alongside envelope air sealing and filtration improvements. Those two systems, the envelope and the energy infrastructure, are interdependent. A leaky building with good solar and battery storage is a pressurized sieve during an AQI 300 day.
California's architects holding Passive House credentials (CPHC or CPHD) have a specific technical advantage in designing for resilience that isn't widely recognized in the field yet. The Passive House standard was originally developed for energy efficiency. Its primary benefit for a resilience hub is the envelope performance that allows a building to remain habitable without power.
The embodied carbon piece matters too. CARB's Buy Clean California Act applies to steel, glass, and flat glass in publicly funded projects. Future SGC criteria are likely to incorporate whole-building lifecycle carbon assessment (WBLCA). Architects who can speak to embodied carbon as part of a grant application are ahead of where most competitive proposals currently land.
Community and educational uses: the year-round case
A resilience hub that opens only during emergencies is a very expensive spare room. The programs that make a hub work as a genuine community asset include:
Health and wellness. Primary care clinics, mental health services, telemedicine stations, vaccine distribution capacity. After COVID-19, the value of a community-based health access point with backup power and ventilation is no longer theoretical.
Food access. Community kitchens, food pantry distribution, urban agriculture education, cold storage that stays cold during outages. The SGC's seven implementation strategies explicitly include "Nature-Based Solutions and Food Security" as a scoring category.
Youth programming. After-school tutoring, vocational training, arts programs. The RYSE Center in Richmond built its solar-plus-battery infrastructure partly because youth programming requires reliable power for equipment, and partly because the youth are the people most connected to the neighborhood's daily life.
Senior services. Cooling and warming centers, social connection, health monitoring, transportation coordination. Seniors are among the most climate-vulnerable populations, and they are also the most reliable users of community facilities if those facilities are designed for their access.
Workforce development. Job training, small business support, clean energy job pathways. The SGC makes workforce development one of the seven scoring strategies, and several Round 1 awardees built it directly into programming plans.
Emergency preparedness education. CERT training, disaster preparedness workshops, multilingual materials. This is the everyday programming that makes the emergency response actually work. When community members know the evacuation routes, have practiced sheltering procedures, and trust the people running the hub, response time drops.
The dual-mode design approach developed by SERA and others involves physically flexible space that can transition from everyday programming to emergency operations without significant reconfiguration. Commercial kitchens can scale from daily food programs to mass meal distribution. Conference rooms become communications centers. Parking lots accommodate temporary shelter structures if needed.
Frequently asked questions
What is a community resilience hub? A community resilience hub is a facility designed to serve its neighborhood year-round and provide shelter, resources, and communications support during climate emergencies. The term was formalized by the Urban Sustainability Directors Network around 2017 and is now the basis for major California and federal grant programs.
How much funding is available for resilience hubs in California in 2026? The California Strategic Growth Council released $153.4 million in Round 2 CRC funding in May 2026. FEMA's BRIC program has $1 billion available federally. Additional IRA, HUD CDBG-DR, and USDA funds are also applicable. Planning grants run $100,000 to $500,000; implementation grants run $1 million to $10 million.
Who can apply for SGC CRC funding? Local governments, tribal entities, nonprofits, and their partnerships. Applicants must demonstrate service to disadvantaged communities (as defined by CalEnviroScreen). Projects must remain resilience centers for a minimum of 15 years.
What credentials does an architect need for resilience hub design? The most relevant are: LEED AP BD+C (sustainability baseline), Passive House CPHC or CPHD (envelope performance — the most differentiating credential for this building type), and familiarity with embodied carbon assessment and WBLCA. Community engagement experience matters as much as technical credentials.
How does Passive House design help during a power outage? A Passive House building's heavily insulated, airtight envelope allows it to hold its interior temperature for 48 to 72 hours without mechanical systems. Combined with very low air infiltration rates and filtered ventilation, a Passive House resilience hub remains habitable and relatively smoke-free during outages that would make a conventionally built community center unusable.
What is the SGC CRC program's history? The California Community Resilience Centers program was authorized by AB 211 in 2022. Round 1 made $98.6 million available and funded 24 projects from 189 applications requesting over $700 million. Round 2 released $153.4 million in May 2026.
References and further reading
Programs:
Research and case studies:
Technical:
About the author
Chunpang (Benson) Chen, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, CPHC, CPHD is a California-licensed architect and the principal of Studio C Architecture, a sole practice based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His credentials include LEED AP BD+C, Certified Passive House Consultant (CPHC), Certified Passive House Designer (CPHD), and AIA membership. Studio C is actively pursuing community resilience center projects in California under the SGC CRC program and FEMA BRIC. Studio C's work spans residential and commercial design with a focus on high-performance building envelopes and climate-adaptive design.
For inquiries about resilience hub design, CRC applications, or Passive House consulting: benson@studiocchen.com
This article was prepared with reference to publicly available SGC program documents, PSE Healthy Energy research, and NorCal Resilience Network case study materials. All funding figures are as of May 2026. Funding availability and program requirements may change; verify current details at sgc.ca.gov.
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