The role of community welfare centers to enhance community disaster resilience

Abstract

For effective disaster management, contemporary society requests a pursuit of a new approach which is related to the concept of CDR (Community Disaster Resilience), focusing more on the adaptation to and ability to deal with unpredictable disaster risks. This study notes community welfare centers play an intermediary role to include the community as a part of the disaster management system. Community welfare centers, which carry out the various roles based on the regional features, could be an essential part of building the effective disaster management system through enhancement of CDR. Nevertheless, nowadays when a disaster occurs, community welfare centers are performing the minimal functions due to the ambiguity in the roles of the community welfare centers. For this reason, it is required that we find out the role of community welfare centers in terms of improving CDR. The point of this study is to define the concept of resilience and to find the roles of community welfare centers through literature reviews. The survey questions were about the level of performance of their traditional CDR related services derived from basic elements of CDR. Also, the importance of both services is measured by the social workers in community welfare centers in Busan, South Korea. The collected data was analyzed. The result is meaningful to find the role community welfare centers to improve CDR and its implication to social welfare practice is to be presented.