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Americans are experiencing numerous interacting perils today, including climate change and rising inequality.

As problems arise, neighbors and strangers have been supporting each other and setting up mutual aid networks.

Forming community-led resilience networks nationwide could help us address the overlapping crises we face.

Recently, I met with a group near Asheville, North Carolina, and asked them how residents dealt with the prolific damage caused by Hurricane Helene that hammered their area in 2024. They all said neighbors—and strangers—helped one another.

Neighbors helping people they know and don't know is always key to surviving calamities and activating positive solutions. With compounding adversities now happening everywhere, building robust social support networks and mutual aid groups in every neighborhood and community should be a top priority. This requires forming local resilience networks nationwide.

The Biggest Challenges Facing Americans Today

Americans today are being impacted by multiple accumulating perils. There are too many to list here, so I am going to focus on just three of the most pressing.

1. Violence by the Federal Government

One hazard that many people are experiencing, at least in certain communities, is aggression and violence by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, which has traumatized immigrants and countless others where it occurs. Yet when ICE appears, what has often kept people safe is neighbors helping neighbors (and strangers). For instance, in many communities, residents are distributing flyers and running workshops on how residents can prepare for and respond to ICE raids, or using community hotlines and whistles to alert people when agents are spotted. These and other actions show that crises can bring residents together to support others they don't know and press for beneficial change.

2. Record Economic Inequality and Related Job and Income Struggles

Another very serious hardship millions of Americans are experiencing is skyrocketing economic inequality. In the U.S., inequality now resembles the pre-Great Depression conditions of a century ago and is by far the largest of all high-income G7 nations. The widespread distress generated by inequality has significantly reduced social cohesion and trust, created poorer health outcomes, produced major job and income struggles, and increased poverty.

But again, in many communities, it is neighbors who take the lead in addressing financial hardships. Examples include neighbors reducing food insecurity by establishing public refrigerators and pantry boxes that allow people to obtain free food. Neighbors also often play important roles in creating better jobs and higher incomes by, for example, establishing local businesses such as shared commercial kitchens to launch companies in the food industry.

3. The Damage and Losses Caused by the Climate-Ecosystem-Biodiversity (C-E-B) Crisis

Unless humanity quickly slashes emissions, within five years temperatures in some parts of the world are likely to rise by close to 2 °C (3.6 °F), at least temporarily. By 2045, temperatures are likely to rise by 2 °C permanently everywhere. More frequent, prolonged, surprising, and destructive weather disasters are now certain. But just as neighbors are stepping forward to help others deal with ICE agents and navigate economic struggles, it is always locals who spontaneously assist others during disasters.

Some residents put their lives on-the-line to save people they don't even know. Neighbors also join together to voluntarily provide practical assistance, as well as food, water, shelter, medical care, emotional support, and other vital needs and services to others during and after a disaster. This organic process is called the "community cohesion" or "honeymoon" phase of a disaster. Following calamities, residents freely come together to provide each other with mutual aid. The process builds connections and trust.

However, the community cohesion phase usually lasts just a few weeks or months, after which the "disillusionment phase" of a disaster kicks in, in which people struggle to mourn what was lost and put their lives back together. For many, the disillusionment phase can last for months or years, and the distress people often feel can generate serious social, psychological, and emotional issues.

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Effective Community Resilience Requires Maintaining "Community Cohesion" Into Perpetuity

The many current and future adversities Americans will experience underscore the urgency of forming the social infrastructure needed to maintain the "community cohesion" phase of disasters into perpetuity and prevent the "disillusionment" phase from occurring.

Organizing local resilience networks in neighborhoods and communities everywhere is the most effective way to achieve this.

Effective community resilience is a collective activity in which people join with others to respond to a shared crisis. A number of factors have been identified that produce these outcomes. They include the strength and extent of social connections, psychological cohesiveness, and trust among local residents, their level of attachment to place, vision of success, and belief in community leaders' capacity to effectively pursue the vision.

These factors combine to determine the level of collective efficacy that exists in a community. This is the belief among residents in their capacity to manage and respond constructively to crises and achieve their collective vision and goals.

Building collective efficacy requires that the top priority is to proactively strengthen the human social, psychological, emotional, and behavioral dimensions of resilience. This requires engaging residents in strengthening "protective factors," with the most important being forming robust networked social support systems and mutual aid networks, to buffer them from and help them push back against severe stresses and traumas.

To prevent and heal mental health, psychosocial, and other issues generated by accelerating adversities, forming resilience networks in every neighborhood and community should now be a top national priority.

© Psychology Today