A Planned Pause — and a Look at What’s Next
Posted: March 17, 2026
The California Resiliency Alliance (CRA) exists because the information problems at the heart of resilience failures are real and consequential. When planners and decision-makers work from incomplete pictures—fragmented data, outdated assumptions, limited visibility into how risks cascade across sectors—the plans they build are more brittle than they appear. The CRA’s work is to help close those gaps: making sense of complex risk information, surfacing what’s emerging before it’s fully visible, and connecting people across the sector divides to strengthen overall resilience.
In 2025 alone, that work looked like this:
The CRA published over 100 regular situational awareness briefs spanning supply chain disruptions, infectious disease, cyber threats, and climate-driven hazards — including more than 60 knowledge tidbits helping practitioners understand the science behind the hazards they plan for.
Our monthly mini exercise scenarios brief delivered more than 65 scenarios to planning and continuity professionals across sectors, covering everything from AI-facilitated insider threats to post-wildfire infrastructure failures.
We launched a new monthly Cyber Data Breach Brief to help organizations track emerging exposure patterns across California.
We co-authored 3 additional facilitator guides for the HayWired Earthquake Scenario Toolkit and co-facilitated resilience workshops using the Toolkit, including a session tailored for Los Angeles County’s emergency volunteer organizations.
We contributed cross-sector perspectives to the Los Angeles Defense Support of Civil Authorities (DSCA) exercise series and the San Francisco Fleet Week exercise series.
We presented on Information Supply Chains at the California Emergency Services Association Conference — and when the material landed, the Bay Area Urban Area Security Initiative invited a repeat presentation for their Emergency Management Working Group.
We engaged with resilience and security communities at the Bay Area UASI Summit, Los Angeles and San Francisco Fleet Week Senior Leaders Seminars, the Sacramento InfraGard Cybersecurity Summit, and the Northern California InfraGard Food and Agriculture Symposium — helping bridge across the sectors.
None of that work happened by accident. It happened because the CRA’s tiny staff of one, showed up consistently, with a clear sense of mission, across a complex and fast-moving risk landscape, for the organizations and communities that depend on that kind of sustained attention.
Today, the CRA itself is navigating a challenge—one we think is worth being direct about.
What’s Happening
Effective March 21, 2026, the CRA has undertaken a three-month operational pause. During this period, we have temporarily suspended publication of our weekly briefs and other regular subscriber content.
The reason is straightforward: the CRA’s current operating model is not financially and operationally sustainable, and continuing at the existing pace while also doing the serious work of addressing that is not realistic. So we have chosen to pause, create the space to think clearly, and build a foundation that can support this work long-term.
This decision reflects months of honest assessment by the CRA’s Board of Directors and a recognition that the organization’s ambitions—and the needs of the communities we serve—require a more durable structure than what currently exists. The pause is not a retreat—it’s an investment in getting this right.
For answers to common questions about the pause, please visit our FAQ page.
What We’ll Be Doing
During the pause, the CRA will focus on several interconnected priorities:
Identifying a sustainable funding and organizational model. This means evaluating revenue strategies, organizational structures, and partnership models that can support the CRA’s mission over the long term—not just sustain current operations, but enable the work to grow.
Understanding how the CRA’s work is used. We will be engaging subscribers, partners, and other stakeholders to learn how CRA materials are being used, where they provide the most value, and where gaps remain. That input will directly shape what comes next.
Refining a multi-year strategy. The CRA has been developing plans to deepen its analytical work, expand its global information network, and build more intentional cross-sector connections across California. The pause creates the time to align those plans with a viable operational model.
Where We’re Headed
The risk landscape the CRA exists to address is not getting simpler. Climate-driven hazards, geopolitical instability, technological disruption, and systemic interdependencies are compounding in ways that make cross-sector sense-making more important—not less. The organizations and communities navigating this environment need better tools, better information, and better connections across the sectors that too often plan in isolation.
That is the work the CRA is here to do. The operational pause is our commitment to ensuring we can do it well, and sustain it.
Achieving that vision will require building a stable funding base in the range of several hundred thousand dollars annually — a realistic target for a nonprofit of this scope, but one that requires deliberate and sustained development.
We intend to resume operations after the pause. When we do, we aim to return with a clearer strategic direction, a stronger organizational foundation, and a sharper sense of where the CRA can have the greatest impact.
A Note to Current Subscribers
If you are a current CRA subscriber, you will have received a direct email from us. If you have questions or did not receive that message, please reach our Executive Director, Monika Stoeffl.
If you are aware of foundations, agencies, or organizations that might be interested in supporting the CRA’s mission, we welcome the connection. Please reach out to Monika Stoeffl at mstoeffl [@] CAresiliency.org.
Stay Connected
We will share updates on this website as our planning progresses. Whether you’d like to be notified when we resume, are interested in subscribing, have perspectives to share, or represent an organization interested in supporting or partnering with the CRA — we’d welcome hearing from you. Please get in touch with us.
